From Chocolate Noise:
In 2003, Jael Rattigan was standing in her kitchen, making a recipe from Alice Medrich’s cookbook Bittersweet, when she felt a strange tingling in her hands. “I looked at them and saw they were covered in chocolate,” she remembered. “And I said aloud, ‘Chocolate is the thing. Chocolate will make me happy.’” Within a few months, she and her now husband Dan Rattigan dropped out of their respective grad programs in Minneapolis, bought an RV, converted it to run on used vegetable oil (“which we spent the summer collecting from the dumpsters behind Chinese restaurants,” Dan said), and drove to Costa Rica to start a new life. A life with chocolate front and center. Eventually, they made their way back to the U.S., where they did it again. Drive into downtown Asheville, North Carolina, and you’ll find an impressive building with the words “French Broad Chocolate Lounge” displayed prominently, as well as a small ice cream, coffee, and chocolate bar shop next door called Chocolate + Milk (pronounced “chocolate milk”).
PHOTO CREDIT: French Broad Chocolate.
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