Queue Up for Chocolate

Last weekend we headed to the city for the annual Ghirardelli Square chocolate festival, a two-day tasting event that takes place on Beach Street next to Aquatic Park. It’s a benefit for Project Open Hand, but also a chance for local chocolate vendors to promote their products.

Here’s how it works: You buy a large ticket for $20 that has numbers 1 through 15 on it. Then you find a line and stand in it.

If you’re lucky, at the end of the line you’ll receive a mini chocolate tart topped with whipped cream and a blueberry. If not, you get frosting. Or six bits of chocolate with nothing to put them in. Each taste costs you a number, which the vendors cross off your card. If you arrive toward the end of the event, like we did, you have the added fun of trying to get all your numbers crossed off by the 5:00 p.m. deadline.

Some of the better tastes included a cup of Ghirardelli’s intense chocolate drink and the Tea Room’s chai-infused chocolate bar. Those tarts were good, too, but I don’t know who sold them because I was too busy grabbing and moving on to the next line.

It was a lovely, sunny day on the water after an arctic summer, so I was happy to be at the square. But if I want a square of Ghirardelli chocolate, I’d rather just buy it at the checkout line.