© www.chocoparis.com 2009. All rights reserved. Between the makers of gourmet dark chocolate and the more mainstream confiseurs-chocolatiers, there are more chocolate shops in the City of Light—the Paris phone directory lists more than 300—than in any other city in the world. From high-end, “designer” artisan-chocolatiers, such as Jean-Paul Hévin, Christian Constant and Pierre Marcolini, [...]

The ancient Maya of Central America were the first to cultivate the cacao tree (theobroma cacao), which the Aztec people of present-day Mexico later called cacahuatl or xocolatl. From its earliest known days, the cacao bean was used as a beverage, and the Nahuatl term xocolatl actually means, depending on the source, “foam water”, “bitter [...]