A Taste of Chocolat in Saint Lucia

Chocolate and nature lovers can find their bliss at Boucan by Hotel Chocolat, a St. Lucia boutique hotel stunningly situated in a rainforest and cocoa groves setting 1,000 feet above the Caribbean with spectacular views of the UNESCO World Heritage Piton mountains. The brainchild of British chocolatier Hotel Chocolat founder Angus Thirwell, Boucan by Chocolat was funded by the zeal to create the best chocolate experience imaginable. Thirwell purchased the oldest cacao planation on St. Lucia in 2006, the 1745 Rabot estate situated 3 miles south of Soufriere, and 13 miles from Hewanorra International Airport, one of two airports on the island and the closest to the Soufriere area hotels and resorts.

Our room was in one of the luxe lodges that sit in an elevated hillside position with a breathtaking, head on view of the Pitons from your private verandah.  During the day, relax on the sun loungers and drink in the view.  At sunset, break open the welcome bottle of chilled prosecco and toast your good fortune to be at Boucan.  We enjoyed listening to music from the iPod provided on the bedside table, while relaxing on the comfortable 4-poster bed with mosquito netting to protect us against possible bug bites.

I particularly enjoyed the oversized bathroom’s open rainforest shower that I frequented every morning.  One of my favorite extra touches was a small mason jar of freshly-made mini chocolate chip cookies that was refilled each day (and did not stay full for long!).  The hotel features an inviting infinity pool with the same dramatic view, reflected to best advantage by the black quartz tiling.

We were celebrating our first wedding anniversary in St. Lucia, and the hotel had left a complimentary plate of chocolates with happy anniversary delicately piped in chocolate, and added a celebratory bottle of champagne. The floral bouquet I had requested exceeded my hopes, packed as it was with a riot of colorful Caribbean flowers, including red ginger lilys and anthuriums.

Without your own car, you are in need of a taxi to get around off property. If you want to experience the beautiful Sugar Beach (and you must!), plan carefully as the there is one daily trip at 10 AM scheduled by van down to a waiting speedboat at Soufriere harbor to Sugar Beach. The trip takes 30 minutes, and the return leaves the dock at Sugar Beach at 4:30 PM, and returns you to Boucan by 5:15 PM.

You can enjoy cocktails at the hotel’s Boucan Restaurant, poolside or on your terrace, or relax with a treatment at the Cocoa Juvenate Spa, which uses estate-prepared products based on antioxidant-packed cocoa beans.
Boucan’s restaurant uses chocolate infused recipes, integrating cocoa into the full dining experience, as befits its being a working cacao plantation. The restaurant even provides cocoa grinders next to the salt and pepper shakers!

At breakfast we enjoyed Rabot at Sea, a very moist cacao-gin cured salmon with arugula salad, and the emphasis on chocolate was found even in the poached or scrambled eggs with toasted muffin served with white or chili-chocolate hollandaise sauce. Our second morning at Boucan was Creole Day, the end of a month-long celebration of St. Lucia’s Creole heritage. To honor the holiday, a traditional Kweyol breakfast was offered as an alternative, consisting of a savory stewed salted fish and crispy fried bakes (a fried dough with hearty texture and flavor), accompanied by a refreshing cucumber salad and a rich and locally-grown avocado salad. Throughout our meal we sipped a traditional cocoa tea, which consists of hot chocolate made with the cacao from their plantation.

Chocolate features throughout the stages of your meal. At dinner, we sampled a sourdough bread appetizer with three tantalizing cacao toppings, a balanced sweet and vinegary chocolate balsamic reduction, cacao pesto and nib butter. A favorite salad was the Cacao Caesar where the combination of crispy roasted sweet potato, creamy soft-boiled egg and crunchy cacao-nib croutons, topped with a roasted cacao-crust chicken breast, resulted in an original, flavorful fusion. Recommended sides were the white chocolate mash and the Caribbean sweet potato chips served with a tangy cacao barbecue sauce. Our main entrée was a 9-hour cacao beer braised lamb slow cooked shoulder with the juciest meat, so tender that it fell off the bone, served on a bed of celeriac puree and finished with a red wine jus. For dessert, a rich molten chocolate lava pudding made from cacao beans served with Rabot nib-infused ice cream and left me wanting to immediately order another!

Cocoa was once Saint Lucia’s most important export, with the number one export now bananas. Boucan’s owners have helped reinvigorate the cacao industry on the island through their Engaged Ethics Program that includes more than 170 cocoa growers, providing support and investment in their success.

You can experience the full chocolate experience courtesy of the hotel’s Tree to Bar Experience, offered as two distinct tours in which guides take you from cacao tree flower to grown pod to finished bar, ready to eat. In 1753 Swedish scientist Carl Linnaeus aptly named the cacao tree Theobroma cacao or “food of the gods”. The tree’s fruit, the cacao pod, develops from flowers that blossom directly from the trunk and branches, and matures in 5 to 6 months. Pods are ovoid in shape and though they start out green in color, during their ripening process they change to yellow, red, orange or even purple. The ripe pod contains a sweet white pulp encasing 30-60 bitter, dark purple beans. Chocolate made its way into Europe through Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes through his interaction with Aztec leader Montezuma. Xocolatl was originally a bitter, grainy beverage enjoyed by the elites of the Olmec, Maya and Aztec societies.

The Tree to Bean portion shows you how the cacao evolves to a mature pod (we were able to pick one on tour), then shows you the production process, and visits the seedling nursery, in which you can graft your own branch onto a cacao plant, and affix your name. Boucan invites you to come back and see your tree grow!

The Bean to Bar tour includes everyone’s favorite experience, making your own chocolate bar. You are given the raw ingredients, along with a warm mortar in which to melt them. Add a lot of elbow grease as you use the pestle to pound and stir, stir, stir until you have a smooth consistency, then pour into the bar-shaped plastic molds. The staff puts your creation on ice so that later in the day you can enjoy your hand-made treat. Tours are daily plus an extra Bean to Bar session on Saturdays, priced at a discount for in-house guests.

The chocolate shop within the Boucan restaurant provides a tempting array of the Hotel Chocolat products. We bought a copy of “Morning to Midnight, a book of chocolate recipes for the whole day and night”, which talks about the company’s history and provides a wealth of tempting ways to enjoy chocolate. The book breaks down recipes by when to enjoy the dish, from breakfast to teatime, snacks to “a la carte” selections for either lunch or dinner. It is a browser’s treat that will have you reaching for your kitchen apron and ordering a plentiful supply of cacao to begin cooking with in new and delicious ways! Have a browse of their diverse treats for sale at the chocolate shop.

Sitting on our verandah our last evening, we popped open the bottle of champagne, sampled a few of the local chocolates grown right at Rabot, and toasted the sunset and grand view of sharp-peaked Petit Piton directly ahead, and our good fortune at having sampled the unique culinary experience at Hotel Chocolat.