Chocolatier lands here

That three years ago, at age 39, chocolatier Christopher Curtin would open a jewel of a chocolate shop - Éclat, by name - offering "free weekend parking above the shop" in the villagelike heart of West Chester does not seem immediately logical, given the nomadic history he is recounting.

In his production room - enrobers flowing and depositors depositing and cooling tunnels cooling - he shows me photos of the grand cakes he helped prepare for the royal wedding in Brussels, and of the noodle shops of Osaka he frequented with his girlfriend while working at Poire, the chocolate shop there ("Osaka is the Lyon of Japan!"), and from his adventures among journeymen pastry chefs across Europe where, in Cologne, he was certified as a master German chocolatier.

He talks of growing up in Madison, Wis., where his father, historian Philip D. Curtin, was a renowned scholar of the African slave trade. His resumé includes pit stops in Vermont, New York and, briefly, Switzerland.

I had run into him a few days before at the 10th anniversary party for Fork, the handsome Old City bistro. Fork's adjoining specialty shop is his only retail outlet outside West Chester, and for the event he'd made 3,000 custom chocolates - buttery ganache coated with a beefed-up 73 percent Tanzanian cacao, fruity and dark and sharp and, in a word, awesome.

He told me his latest wrinkle (beyond a line of sublime chocolates infused with balsamy, Balinese long pepper, with calvados and soft waves of star anise) was a minimalist take on the mendiant, the traditional Provençal holiday treat - a wafer of chocolate topped with raisins, hazelnuts, dried figs and almonds, symbolizing the colors of the robes of the four mendicant monastic orders.

So here they were - the first batch of thin, single-origin mendiants, stacked like Pringles in transparent cylinders. (Single-origin is one of those ambiguous terms, meaning the cacao beans come from the same region, though they might be different varieties. The refinement these days is estate-grown, narrowing the beans to a particular terroir: the Alto El Sol mendiant, for instance, from the Saavedra del Castillo family's estate in the Peruvian jungle.)

I say "minimalist" versions because Curtin sprinkles most of them with just a hint of spice or cacao nib, rather than fruits and nuts. This is, he says, in order to showcase the distinctive flavors of the chocolate, pure and unmediated.

There is a touch of unabashed marketing, of course, in calling them "the modern chocolate bar." But their thin profile and broad surface area, especially at room temperature, indeed telegraph a potent chocolate hit: There's no distraction; no mistaking the disks for "candy."

They are dark and snappingly crisp and efficient, the chocolate equivalent of an after-dinner mint. The Sao Tome (70 percent) is almost tobacco-y; the Peruvian Alto El Sol, (65 percent) sweeter and fruitier; the Tanzanian (75 percent), hinting of black cherry and dried apricot; the Ecuadorian (70 percent), creamy, lush and aromatic; each has its own character, although the Aleppo Pink Peppercorn (60 percent) is a bit much, firing up the throat.

Why here? Why now? Curtin says it was time to get serious. Not until I ask again later does he mention his deep family roots here; an ancestor, Andrew Gregg Curtin, was Pennsylvania's governor during the Civil War, family members were schooled at Swarthmore, and his retired parents now reside in a Quaker retirement community near Kennett Square.

And why Fork? His best friend growing up in Madison was Antonio Sella, the twin brother of Fork's co-owner, Roberto Sella, who Curtin - wouldn't you know? - ran into outside the restaurant on Market Street a few years ago.

The rest is history.

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