Cacao 70 started in Montreal as a venue for drinkable chocolate.
If you’ve ever had a cup of instant hot chocolate, that cloying brown dust with inhumane amounts of sugar to which you add hot water, you will appreciate why a high quality chocolate beverage made from top tier cocoa is a special thing. The concept proved popular and soon, from its very specific roots, Cacao 70 evolved, both in offerings and locations, and the brand now spans nine Canadian cities through franchising.
While the core product remains chocolate, each Cacao venue seems to have a slightly different emphasis. The North Vancouver location, situated near the fountain just outside Lonsdale Quay’s main market, is a waffle haven. Waffles with ice cream. Waffles with chocolate. Waffles with matcha, brownies, crème brulee cheesecake, sesame, bananas, peanut butter, whipped cream, pretzels, and caramel sauce. Waffles with chicken.
All Cacao waffles are made in-house, golden and springy, to order.
The choco-centric operation also serves brunch every day until 4 p.m., with a handful of savoury items including omelettes and buckwheat crepes.
Before going into specifics of my recent meal there, I want to call out something that rarely gets attention except when it is lacking: cleanliness. I must commend Cacao 70 for being immaculate, its black and white tiles, wooden tables and countertops positively sparkled from one end of the venue to the other. While maybe a trifling point to some, I find this is a remarkable feat given the volume of sticky, melty stuff on offer here. Of particular significance to me as a parent was the pristine state of their high chairs and the fastidiously maintained change table in the washroom; this is a family-friendly venue.
I popped in with my wife and two of our kids first thing on recent Saturday morning. After browsing the menu and eyeing up the great vats of hot chocolate beverages on display, we settled on three dishes for what would prove to be a completely over-the-top, ludicrously indulgent meal.
It has been said many times before that the English language is poorly equipped to describe meals and flavours. One can only employ terms like rich, spicy, tasty, generous and so forth so many times before it becomes trite and tiresome. So for the record, I will say here that from this point forward, whenever I employ the term “decadent” in this column, I will use the waffle dishes at Cacao 70 as my benchmark, the baseline measure against which the term is given weight.
My two girls split something called The Peanutjob, a waffle topped with a scoop of soft serve vanilla ice cream and chocolate sauce, accompanied by a crispy, buttery chocolate peanut butter cake with whipped cream, brulee bananas (little rounds of fresh banana with torch-crisped sugar atop), pretzels and caramel sauce.
The dish was perhaps the first tangible manifestation of the concept of too much of a good thing for these girls with a proven sweet tooth. Despite a strong start and a sustained, valiant effort, the kids were completely bested about half way through the dish, leaving the parents to attempt to get the most out of the plate.
This was a tall order for my wife and I at this stage as we had worked our way through a shared, requisite savoury dish – the Hangover Omelette, made with red peppers, cheddar, green onion, and basil pesto – and were struggling with another shared order, a waffle concoction called The After Party. You see, our omelette, a sizable meal in its own right, came with a salad of tossed greens, multigrain bread and a “side” of chocolate fondue with fresh fruit. You know, as you do with an omelette.
The fondue side dish would have been ample for sweet fare, so the After Party was a proper nail in the coffin. Made with a waffle base, it was stacked with fresh strawberries, whipped cream, fresh berry sauce, chocolate chunks, chocolate–covered cereal, and white chocolate drizzle. It’s almost like the Cacao 70 menu is a dare to diners, as if the corporate chef is sitting watching from a control room somewhere chuckling maliciously to himself as diner after diner fails to finish their dishes.
Lemon-infused water is available for self-service and provides a welcome contrast to all the sweetness. Of course, like the Cacao 70 novices we were, we washed our meals down with a round of hot chocolates, including a delicious Mexican–inspired version with cinnamon and chili pepper.
Our shameless ode to excess was $62.
Cacao 70. 143 Chadwick Court, North Vancouver. Cacao70.com.
