Salon du Chocolat Extreme
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Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory was always one of my favorite books as a child. Poor little Charlie taken by his loving grand-dad into Willy Wonka’s magical world of delights… and traps. Of course, Dahl’s book has a dark edge to it that is far from sweet and milky, and all the naughty, spoilt and greedy children are soon found out, exposed, and rejected by Wonka, until only poor, humble Charlie and his grand-dad are left. Look at the Salon du Chocolat event–held at the Parc des Expositions in the 15th Arrondissement–from that perspective, and I was pretty much doomed from the start.
The chocolate equivalent of gold-lust fever set in early. With no mobile-phone to help, I had waited at the Porte de Versailles metro stop for at least fifteen minutes with no sign of Gabrielle. The word was–as this was a journalists’ only evening–there would be a lot of free chocolate to be had, and Gabrielle and I had already started seeing each other as competition. Spying a second metro-exit across the road, I hopefully ran across. Still no Gabrielle. I started to get nervous, suspicious, even paranoid as I glanced hungrily around, unconsciously wiping drool away from my chin with the back of my hand.
“She’s up there already,” I thought, “that evil minx. She gave me the wrong time and she’s up there right now, nice and warm, stuffing her face and laughing; chocolate-colored drool hanging from her lips. I bet Karen Fawcett, Sarah Gilbert Fox and the whole goddamn bunch are up there, giving each other the high-five, chomping and slobbering, while I starve outside, freezing like an idiot!” I stood there, transfixed, imagining the scene.
The next thing I knew, I was running towards the huge hall with the Salon du Chocolat sign plastered across it, yelling, “Wait for me!” When I got to the entrance–after rolling over the bonnet of a car and knocking a couple of women off their bicycles–I saw a bunch of security guys guarding the doors and remembered that Gabrielle had cunningly offered to bring my Press Pass along with her. I was daunted only until the smell of chocolate from the Promised Land beyond the barrier drifted across to me. There were lights and music beyond there; hundreds of people milling around. The first singular thing I noticed was a large Hanzel & Gretal house made entirely from Lindt chocolate. “If I get in here,” I promised myself, “I’m going to eat it.”
I immarched up to a security guy, asked him if he spoke English, and, before he could answer, told him I was press and that my colleague had entered, taking my pass with her. I mentioned the words “International Incident,” but he didn’t seemed phased. An international incident about a chocolate show? He stepped aside.
It was a chocolate wonderland. Wonka would have been proud. I walked around and around the chocolate house, looking in through the glass at all the pretty parcels of chocolates in there, scoping it out like a pro before making my move, then skulked away, further into the huge hall where a stage was set up in a tent. A cool African band sang and beat on drums, showing teeth that looked as though chocolate had never touched them, as the audience smiled and clapped along, eating little delights that were being passed around, licking chocolate from their fingers.
I was approached by a six-foot blonde, beaming from ear to ear, wearing a pair of huge fluffy pink boots and short-pink-pants several sizes too small for her. She held a tray out to me that had several bite-size chocolates on it. I wondered if I was dreaming, and if I was, why I had never thought to dream this before. I took a chocolate and popped it into my mouth. The moment the delicious, soft-orange taste opened up in there, the girl disappeared. This was a game that couldn’t be won. You can’t have everything. I turned around dreamily and saw Gabrielle walking towards me. I swallowed hard and quickly wiped my mouth. “Where the hell were you?!” I demanded, lurching straight into defensive mode. I looked at her mouth. No signs of chocolate-lust, but what did that prove? “I waited for ages!” I moaned, using my tongue to flick a bit of chocolate from a tooth cavity into the back of my throat. “And I’m starving!”
Gabrielle just shook her head knowingly and suggested that we look around. It turned out that there was a second set of metro-exits nearby, and she had been waiting at one of those. Still, here we were, so we started snooping. Chocolate everywhere. All kinds, all shapes and sizes, each more mouth-wateringly tempting than the last. But there were prices attached. I bought a long stick of chocolate with green marshmallow goo inside and it was delicious; Gabrielle bought some chocolate-coated Marzipan snacks. Stall after stall of it… boxes, bows, ribbons… every make you can name and more. TV cameras moved to the tent as the mayor, Bertrand Delanoe, made a speech. Gabrielle seemed interested, but I just positioned myself next to a free samples bowl and nodded approvingly every so often whilst grabbing fistfuls of chocolate buttons. I didn’t know what he was talking about and I didn’t care. Yum, yum.
Moving away from the tent and back to the chocolate house, I was thrown by the fact that Gabrielle spotted some guy picking a chocolate from a sculpture by the side of the house. Not wanting to be outdone, I grabbed one too, and spotted a little girl pointing at me, wide-eyed, as I popped the evidence into my mouth. I was busted, and I knew it. Within two seconds an embarrassed looking man–clearly the artist–was asking me in French not to eat his masterpiece. I pretended not to understand, and simply smiled and chewed, looking puzzled. Gabrielle was getting a lot out of the moment, though….
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Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory was always one of my favorite books as a child. Poor little Charlie taken by his loving grand-dad into Willy Wonka’s magical world of delights… and traps. Of course, Dahl’s book has a dark edge to it that is far from sweet and milky, and all the naughty, spoilt and greedy children are soon found out, exposed, and rejected by Wonka, until only poor, humble Charlie and his grand-dad are left. Look at the Salon du Chocolat event–held at the Parc des Expositions in the 15th Arrondissement–from that perspective, and I was pretty much doomed from the start.
The chocolate equivalent of gold-lust fever set in early. With no mobile-phone to help, I had waited at the Porte de Versailles metro stop for at least fifteen minutes with no sign of Gabrielle. The word was–as this was a journalists’ only evening–there would be a lot of free chocolate to be had, and Gabrielle and I had already started seeing each other as competition. Spying a second metro-exit across the road, I hopefully ran across. Still no Gabrielle. I started to get nervous, suspicious, even paranoid as I glanced hungrily around, unconsciously wiping drool away from my chin with the back of my hand.
“She’s up there already,” I thought, “that evil minx. She gave me the wrong time and she’s up there right now, nice and warm, stuffing her face and laughing; chocolate-colored drool hanging from her lips. I bet Karen Fawcett, Sarah Gilbert Fox and the whole goddamn bunch are up there, giving each other the high-five, chomping and slobbering, while I starve outside, freezing like an idiot!” I stood there, transfixed, imagining the scene.
The next thing I knew, I was running towards the huge hall with the Salon du Chocolat sign plastered across it, yelling, “Wait for me!” When I got to the entrance–after rolling over the bonnet of a car and knocking a couple of women off their bicycles–I saw a bunch of security guys guarding the doors and remembered that Gabrielle had cunningly offered to bring my Press Pass along with her. I was daunted only until the smell of chocolate from the Promised Land beyond the barrier drifted across to me. There were lights and music beyond there; hundreds of people milling around. The first singular thing I noticed was a large Hanzel & Gretal house made entirely from Lindt chocolate. “If I get in here,” I promised myself, “I’m going to eat it.”
I immarched up to a security guy, asked him if he spoke English, and, before he could answer, told him I was press and that my colleague had entered, taking my pass with her. I mentioned the words “International Incident,” but he didn’t seemed phased. An international incident about a chocolate show? He stepped aside.
It was a chocolate wonderland. Wonka would have been proud. I walked around and around the chocolate house, looking in through the glass at all the pretty parcels of chocolates in there, scoping it out like a pro before making my move, then skulked away, further into the huge hall where a stage was set up in a tent. A cool African band sang and beat on drums, showing teeth that looked as though chocolate had never touched them, as the audience smiled and clapped along, eating little delights that were being passed around, licking chocolate from their fingers.
I was approached by a six-foot blonde, beaming from ear to ear, wearing a pair of huge fluffy pink boots and short-pink-pants several sizes too small for her. She held a tray out to me that had several bite-size chocolates on it. I wondered if I was dreaming, and if I was, why I had never thought to dream this before. I took a chocolate and popped it into my mouth. The moment the delicious, soft-orange taste opened up in there, the girl disappeared. This was a game that couldn’t be won. You can’t have everything. I turned around dreamily and saw Gabrielle walking towards me. I swallowed hard and quickly wiped my mouth. “Where the hell were you?!” I demanded, lurching straight into defensive mode. I looked at her mouth. No signs of chocolate-lust, but what did that prove? “I waited for ages!” I moaned, using my tongue to flick a bit of chocolate from a tooth cavity into the back of my throat. “And I’m starving!”
Gabrielle just shook her head knowingly and suggested that we look around. It turned out that there was a second set of metro-exits nearby, and she had been waiting at one of those. Still, here we were, so we started snooping. Chocolate everywhere. All kinds, all shapes and sizes, each more mouth-wateringly tempting than the last. But there were prices attached. I bought a long stick of chocolate with green marshmallow goo inside and it was delicious; Gabrielle bought some chocolate-coated Marzipan snacks. Stall after stall of it… boxes, bows, ribbons… every make you can name and more. TV cameras moved to the tent as the mayor, Bertrand Delanoe, made a speech. Gabrielle seemed interested, but I just positioned myself next to a free samples bowl and nodded approvingly every so often whilst grabbing fistfuls of chocolate buttons. I didn’t know what he was talking about and I didn’t care. Yum, yum.Moving away from the tent and back to the chocolate house, I was thrown by the fact that Gabrielle spotted some guy picking a chocolate from a sculpture by the side of the house. Not wanting to be outdone, I grabbed one too, and spotted a little girl pointing at me, wide-eyed, as I popped the evidence into my mouth. I was busted, and I knew it. Within two seconds an embarrassed looking man–clearly the artist–was asking me in French not to eat his masterpiece. I pretended not to understand, and simply smiled and chewed, looking puzzled. Gabrielle was getting a lot out of the moment, though. She was laughing her head off.
The man left and I became immediately self-justified. “The French are control freaks!” I stormed. “They control you on the metro! They control you in parks! They control you in the cinema! Then you come to a chocolate show and what’s the first thing you hear?! ‘Don’t eat the chocolate!’ Zhut Alors!’” But Gabrielle just kept laughing. I didn’t really blame her. I didn’t blame the guy or his pretty little assistant who blew the whistle on me. His house was a masterpiece, no arguments; a true work of art. In fact, if I have one genuine, hopefully constructive criticism to lay against this talented individual, it is this: YOU MADE IT OUT OF CHOCOLATE, YOU MORON! WHAT DID YOU THINK WOULD HAPPEN?! But I had already had an effect on his sensitive artist’s soul, because for the rest of the evening I kept seeing him marching around and around his ever-shrinking house, guarding it like a hound.But the temptation was far from over, and it came in the form of no lesser a person than Marilyn Monroe–a goddess in my eyes–via the talent of the Australian artist Sid Chidiac, Oil and Chocolate Painter. There she was, Monroe herself, painted life-like in chocolate, totally edible, as she always had been. I became watery-eyed and watery-mouthed as I store at her, which was probably the artist’s intention. “If there’s one person in this world I’ve always wanted to lick…” I thought. It was like a dream come true, but the chocolate brick-layer and his little assistant had knocked the confidence out of me and I couldn’t go through with it. I had to walk away–follow the giggling Gabrielle towards a couple of purchases and a few photographs, before making for the exit–with a tear in my eye and a lump of stolen chocolate in my throat.
Goodbye, Norma Jean.
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