It would be all to easy for this post to quickly descend in to a gushing ode to one of Liverpool’s coolest cafès bars: Ropes & Twines, but it’s not their passion for great coffee or carefully curated wine list that we’re here to dissect today, rather something a little more unusual. For in the basement of the aforementioned cafè comes a chocolate workshop and production line that would make Wonka himself start to sweat. Meet Table Chocolate, Liverpool’s first (and only) bean-to-bar chocolatiers.
Like all great ideas, R&T owner Tian decided he was going to make his own chocolate after a few drinks too many. One phone call to his old friend Remy (a master pastry chef, as it happens) and a few months of waiting out the pandemic pandemic and Remy moves his entire family from Argentina to Liverpool to start bringing the idea to life.
Whilst making great tasting chocolate is the goal, it’s the underlying principals of ensuring fairness and equality at every step of the production process that makes this endeavour different. Table Chocolate is about traceability, ethics and sustainability starting from the farmers who produce the cacao beans right up to the customers in store. ‘That’s where the name comes from’, Tian explains, ‘We wanted the whole process to be transparent… like we’re laying it all out on the table’.
