Chocolates

– Poppy & Peep –

$4 per chocolate, discounts for larger orders / March 2022

If you’ve gone over to the About part of this website, then you know I spent four years eating (and drinking) my way through Belgium. It’s a country where it’s almost impossible to get a bad meal; a plain ham sandwich from a kiosk in a subway station will still blow you away. The Belgians value their food. They use premium ingredients, and they leave the pyrotechnics alone. No one’s hiding anything behind anything.

Despite extreme proficiency throughout the cooking pantheon, the Belgians, of course, are known for two particular things: beer and chocolate. We’ll leave the beer for another day. The chocolates…ok, this is how you eat a truffle in Brussels: Turn out all the lights in the room, put some classical music on, put the whole damn thing in your mouth at once, and on pain of death, do not bite. Do not talk. Do not multi-task. Just let it melt, sitting there for a full five minutes as the traces slowly, begrudgingly disappear. Five minutes. Try that with a Hershey bar.

Poppy & Peep is not a purveyor of fine Belgian chocolates, and for Nashville, that’s a good thing. As hidden as possible while still sitting north of the 440 highway, it calls itself a “micro-factory.” Too modest. While the first half, judging by the shop, couldn’t be more accurate, labeling itself a “factory” of any kind is an injustice. There is nothing factory-like at all about the ingredients, or the care they use in crafting their “bon bons,” which come in about a dozen different flavors each day. Each one pops. I suspect, from the looks of the chocolates, that someone in there has an art degree.

Poppy & Peep does do chocolate in other guises. They have some magnificent bars, for example, one featuring bergamot and clove. Fruits are dipped. Another star of the show: the sipping cup, which uses oat milk. I asked them, given the remoteness of their location, how many walk-up customers they see each day. About 10, they said; most of the business is corporate, hotels and the like. Fair enough, but it might be worth tweaking the price for retail customers, as it sits much higher than, say, that charged by Neuhaus, Belgium’s finest chocolate maker. Then again, Poppy & Peep’s chocolates can’t get any fresher, and with just a little effort, you won’t have to pay for shipping.