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A Chocolate Sensation: Our Review of The Chocolatarium
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Do you know how much an Ecuadorian cacao bean farmer earns? Why you can’t grow cacao trees in Scotland? How much pressure it takes to crush a cacao bean into coco butter? Which country eats the most chocolate?
No? Then you need to try a tour of The Chocolatarium, one of Edinburgh’s newest attractions, opening at the end of last year, where all these questions and more are answered. The biggest question, though, is why no one has thought to do this before? I mean, who doesn’t love chocolate? And to put together an experience where you taste it, make it, smell it, see it in all its stages of production and find out strange and fascinating facts about its history and modern manufacture all in one go is a great idea.
Jenny McLay, however, is probably quite pleased no one has. The Edinburgh-born owner and founder of The Chocolatarium first saw cacao trees (the seeds of which are cocoa beans, used to make chocolate) while living in Ecuador over a decade ago and became fascinated by story of chocolate. The end result is The Chocolatarium.
Our tour, it has to be said, didn’t get off to a great start. We were early to arrive at the Cranston Street centre (the steep road running from opposite the council HQ to the Royal Mile) which is unheard for us. So my nine-year-old was already restless and bored after 20 minutes in the waiting room. This is a child who is rather fussy – getting vegetables into him is a daily trauma; even child-friendly faves like sweetcorn and peas get the thumbs-down. And he likes milk chocolate. Not dark, not white, just milk, ideally with hazelnuts. Nuts I had guessed for safety reasons wouldn’t be included (they weren’t) but I hadn’t reckoned on no dairy milk chocolate either – only oat milk. His face fell. My heart sank. It was going to be a long hour and a half.
We all filed into the first room, The Jungle, where we and the others on the tour (there’s a maximum of 16) all sat on benches facing our host, bright and breezy Hungarian Anika, and a display including a life-sized artificial cacao tree. There we learned lots of facts about the trees, the farmers and how the beans get from the pod to the bars in our shops, in a fun, entertaining and very interactive session. The tour is for 8+ and I would say that’s pitched about right – younger ones would have found this bit dull but it’s just perfect for that older primary school age group , with their love of facts. My two really enjoyed it and bounced through to the next room, The Kitchen, where we all had a go at tasting, smelling, peeling – this is a very hands-on tour – the beans as we learned about the production process before the best bit, doing some actual making, with a selection of moulds, including lots of child-friendly ones and a huge array of toppings, from sea salt to honeycomb.
The final room was History and Tasting. Fairly self-explanatory from the name what happens here. And it was here my nine-year-old astounded me by tasting a selection including dark chocolate flavoured with Scots pine before deciding he liked the dark chocolate with orange and cardamom best, leading Anika to compliment him on his sophisticated grown-up tastes. If only she knew.
After that, there was time to browse the small shop, selling the artisan chocolatiers’ products we’d been tasting, before our own creations were ready to take home, where my nine-year-old also stunned his father with his newly acquired sophisticated chocolate tastes. (It didn’t extend to his vegetables at teatime, sadly - I need a vegetarium to open).
My nine-year-old said: “I liked the part where she showed us the different parts of the cacao beans and how they got made into chocolate and how different types of chocolate were made in different ways, and how some chocolates could taste different just because of the soil. I think it was amazing and I’d give it ten out of ten.”
My daughter, who had been on a chocolate experience (outside Edinburgh) for a friend’s birthday party, declared this one far better. “The lady was really good at explaining things and she knew a lot about chocolate. I liked tasting the chocolates from different countries and companies. I was quite surprised I liked the cacao bean as I thought I had a really sweet tooth.”
*Tickets for the Tour of Chocolate are £18 for adults and £12 children (min. age 8) and last one hour and 30 mins. Birthday parties cost from £168 for up to 12 children, minimum age 7. The Chocolatarium, 3-5 Cranston Street, EH8 8BE,
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