Lula Cafe Imports Mast Brothers Chocolate for Desserts

While we await the opening of the expanded Lula Cafe, the restaurant has revealed one of its new additions. We know that the new room will feature a pastry gallery for recently hired pastry chef Kate Neumann, but one thing we just discovered is she starting using a highly coveted treat in some of her desserts: Mast Brothers Chocolate.

Last night, we attended a pastry tasting at the Logan Square restaurant and dipped our spoon in a rich chocolate pot de creme made from Mast Brothers chocolate and is was like heaven. The Brooklyn-based craft chocolatier has a long waiting list of clients who want to use their products and Lula is the first, and possibly only, restaurant in the Midwest to get their goods, according to chef/owner Jason Hammel.

Mast Brothers works with only the best cacao producers in the world, like the Somia Plantation in Madagascar and ancient cacao farms along the northern Venezuelan coast.

So how coveted is this chocolate. Hammel said that Mast Brothers claims Blue Hill, French Laundry and Per Se as clients. "There's nothing like it," Hammel said. "It's like what BLiS maple syrup is to regular syrup."
· Lula Cafe Expanding, Adding Pastry and Coffee Programs; Will Take Reservations [~EChi~]

UPDATE: We got an email late Friday letting us know that Lula Cafe is, in fact, not the first spot in the Midwest to have Mast Brothers. Chef's Table, a restaurant in Iowa City where the Mast Brothers grew up, has apparently been using their chocolate since last October.