Nobody likes snobs. Including snobs like myself. Because no matter how hard I try to look cool, pretending I know something nobody else does, I'm mostly wrong and quietly losing the whole game to more open-minded people.

I'm aware of the risk of an open mind. It's a little like an open trash bin — leave the lid up and people will throw all manner of garbage in. But there's also a chance that occasionally, nestled between the banana peels and the empty bottles, somebody tosses in a diamond ring. Possibly, on a very good day, two.

The same trap waits for anyone who decides that pure single-origin dark chocolate is the only respectable way to love this stuff. We like to picture ourselves — it rarely happens in real life — sitting somewhere candlelit with a rare Barolo, a wedge of Castelmagno, and a square of 70% Cuzco Chuncho, nodding gravely at the tannins. And in staging that little fantasy, we quietly bolt the door on an entire bottomless world of whites, rosés, ports and artisanal cocktails. Which is a shame, because some of the diamond rings are in there.

And chocolate cocktails, as it happens, are exactly what this is about.

Now, a warning before we go any further: there is going to be jargon. A great deal of it. Words that sound made up and are not. I promise to translate every one of them, because a word you don't understand isn't sophistication — it's just a locked door with the key sitting right there.

Let's begin with a round of applause. This week, Allo Simonne — a Montreal maker — walked out of the 2026 International Chocolate Awards Canadian Bean-to-Bar and Craft Chocolatier competition with two Golds. Both scored exactly 90.0, which is either a lovely coincidence or evidence that they've cracked some code the rest of us haven't. I lean toward the second.

A quick word on who they are, because the story is better than the average brand fairy tale. Allo Simonne was founded in 2018 by two Belgians, Quentin Ryckaert and Vincent Coja, and named — this is the part I love — after Quentin's grandmother, Simonne Allo, described in the family telling as a resolutely modern woman with an appetite for the finer things. They started with hazelnut-chocolate spreads. Then, wanting to work closer to the bean, they handed the operational and R&D reins to a Mexican master chocolatier named Fernando Galván, who had spent years making bean-to-bar chocolate in Mexico before landing in Montreal. That collision — Belgian pastry heritage, a grandmother's name, and a Mexican maker's obsession with cacao and its wilder relatives — is exactly why their lineup of gianduja bars, Jaguar chocolate and spreads looks like nothing else in Canada.

The hero of the day is the first Gold: their Gianduja with Buckwheat & Melilot Flowers. A name that asks a lot of you. So, as promised, the translations.

Gianduja — pronounced jahn-DOO-yah, and don't feel bad, everyone gets it wrong the first time — is a silky blend of chocolate and roasted hazelnut. It was born in Turin in the early 1800s, when Napoleon's continental blockade choked off the cocoa supply and thrifty Piedmontese chocolatiers stretched what little they had with the local hazelnuts. Necessity, mother of invention, grandmother of every chocolate-hazelnut spread that came after. It melts differently from a plain bar — softer, rounder, more forgiving.

Jaguar is the showy one. It's the maker's name for Theobroma bicolor, a wild botanical cousin of the true cacao tree (Theobroma cacao), known variously as pataxte, mocambo or white cacao. The Maya and their neighbours were folding it into their chocolate drinks centuries before it turned up on a modern ingredients panel. It's paler, milder and creamier than cacao, and it lends the bar a subtle, exotic note underneath the dark — the "alternate theobroma" that the ICA judges liked enough to hang a special mention on.

Melilot is the one that makes people squint. It's sweet clover — Melilotus — a scrappy yellow-flowered weed you've walked past on a thousand roadsides without a second glance. Crushed and dried, it gives off an aroma of vanilla, fresh hay and honey (the same compound, coumarin, that makes tonka beans and new-mown grass smell the way they do). Allo Simonne wild-harvests it in Quebec, which is why the judges also tacked on a "local ingredients" mention. It's the whisper of sweetness that lifts everything darker in the bar.

And the buckwheat — the trendy one. First, a myth to bust: buckwheat is not wheat, and it's not even a grass. It's a seed, a distant relative of rhubarb, naturally gluten-free, which is a large part of why it's having its moment on wellness shelves and pastry menus alike. Toasted, it turns nutty and earthy with a proper crackle. In this bar it does the job a cocoa nib does — texture, roast, a little bitterness to argue with the sweet — except it's soft-spoken about it.

Put the four together and you get one genuinely addictive bar. The kind we would sail straight past if we stayed barricaded inside our single-origin dark-chocolate fortress, congratulating ourselves on our restraint while missing the diamond ring in the bin.

And the second Gold? It went to their Buckwheat Spread — same 90.0, same buckwheat idea, in jar form. That's not a coincidence. That's a maker who found a very good thing and had the nerve to build twice on it. (They also collected a fistful of Silvers this year — for the plain gianduja, the cacao-nib gianduja, the whole-hazelnut bar and the Jaguar spread — so the buckwheat wasn't beginner's luck.)

Keep the lid up. You never know what someone's going to throw in.

Reserve the bar →

Or the award-winning spread → 

Or shop the whole collection →

One note on delivery: your order ships after September, once the temperature drops. This isn't slowness — it's the single non-negotiable of shipping real chocolate through a heatwave. A few weeks' patience, and it arrives as Fernando made it rather than as a rustic puddle with ambitions. We care more about the state it reaches you in than the date it leaves here.

The makers

Allo Simonne — Montreal, Canada. Founded 2018 by Quentin Ryckaert & Vincent Coja; bean-to-bar operations and R&D led by master chocolatier Fernando Galván. Two Golds at the 2026 ICA Canadian Bean-to-Bar & Craft Chocolatier competition.

Gold #1 — the bar — Dark Chocolate Gianduja with Buckwheat & Melilot Flowers. 150g. Hazelnut praliné, 70% dark, Jaguar chocolate (Theobroma bicolor), roasted buckwheat, wild Quebec melilot. ICA 2026 Gold (90.0), + specials for Local Ingredients and Alternate Theobromas. Vegan · Gluten-free.

Gold #2 — the spread — Dark Chocolate Buckwheat Spread. ICA 2026 Gold (90.0), + specials for Local Ingredients and Gastronomic. No added oils.

Ships after September, once it's cool enough to travel.