Chocolaterie Vincent Guerlais

Cocoa handled from the bean

What separates this Nantes house from a chocolate shop that buys in couverture is Cacao Facture, the chocolate-processing workshop Vincent Guerlais opened in 2008 outside the city, a year after setting up a laboratory for developing new work. It takes the work back to bean selection and carries it through to the wrapped bar, so origin, traceability and quality are handled in house rather than left to a supplier several steps upstream. The Franklin boutique is where that work is sold: a polished retail counter for chocolate, pastry, macarons and biscuits rather than a salon with tables, and the finished pieces in the case are the argument for the whole arrangement. Very few chocolatiers of this size carry the process that far back.

A Nantes house with a president’s chair

Guerlais started in pastry at fourteen and opened his own Nantes shop at twenty-two, in 1997, with his wife. The boutique sits in the Graslin-Commerce district and has been a local reference since, the original point of a house that now runs several sites around the region and a biscuit business in Nagoya. He works across chocolate, pastry and biscuit-making, and is known locally as l’agitateur de papilles. In 2018 he became president of Relais Desserts, the association of French pastry chefs and chocolatiers, which places the counter squarely in the top tier of French artisan work. The house also runs a three-hour Atelier Gourmand for anyone who would rather make something than buy it.

What to take from the counter

Work through the categories: chocolates, pastries, macarons and biscuits. The clearest named thing to buy is the Choco’ Nantais, a rework of a local biscuit tradition in three layers, with roasted hazelnuts, milk chocolate and vanilla and a gianduja filling. It is a good illustration of the house habit of taking a regional reference and giving it a technical chocolate-and-pastry structure. On the pastry side the work is strongly chocolate-led, with the Fondant Nantais and Kawaii among its named creations. Summer brings the Guerl’Ice range of iced treats and the Passeport d’Été, so the case in July looks nothing like the case in November. If you are buying to give, the boxed chocolates are the safest choice and the most representative of what the workshop does, since they are the products the bean-to-bar operation exists to make.