Jordi Roca opens chocolate shop in Hong Kong

Jordi Roca, the famed pastry chef of the three-Michelin-star El Celler de Can Roca in Girona, is launching a pop-up chocolate shop in Hong Kong.

Opened last year in Girona, Spain, Casa Cacao is a luxury chocolatier owned by chef Roca, who won the inaugural ‘World’s Best Pastry Chef’ award from The World’s 50 Best Restaurants awards in 2014.

The shop combines a chocolate factory, shop and café with the Hotel Casa Cacao on its upper floors, directed by another member of the Roca family, Anna Payet.

Adopting a bean-to-bar philosophy that echoes the farm-to-table movement, chef Roca and his team source selected cacao beans from Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela, Peru, the Dominican Republic and India.

After the beans arrive at the workshop in Girona, they are sorted by hand, roasted, cracked and winnowed, then combined with organic cane sugar and cocoa butter before going through the conching process, which ensures a perfectly smooth product, for a minimum of 48 hours.

Unlike mass-produced chocolate, the artisanal chocolate highlights the different flavours and aromas of cacao grown in different regions – much like wines express the terroir of where they were produced.

The pop-up will take place at the new branch of specialty coffee roastery Cupping Room in Harbour City, Tsim Sha Tsui. The chocolate items include bombones (bonbons), available in boxes of 32 assorted pieces, and chocolate bars, which showcase a selection with varying countries of origin and cacao percentages.

Casa Cacao’s signature hot chocolate, made with 72% single-origin cacao cultivated and fermented in the Kaithpara Forest in Kerala, India, will also be presented in the pop-up.

Boasting a flavour profile with notes of dry raisins and apricots but no bitterness, the hot chocolate also features a very pleasant lactic acidity. In addition, visitors can also try a special collaboration mocha drink combining Casa Cacao chocolate with Cupping Room coffee.

“We are very happy to make this pop-up in Hong Kong and we hope it will be the first of many to introduce our chocolate to such a sensitive and demanding audience,” said Roca.

“We’re particularly excited about this collaboration because Casa Cacao and Cupping Room share the same philosophy of sourcing high-quality ingredients and showcasing their unique characteristics,” added Teddy Pun, managing director of Cupping Room Coffee Roasters.