Philadelphia Weekly

Even if you knew absolutely nothing about Max Brenner, even if you were an exchange student from Borneo or an alien just beamed down to 1500 Walnut St., Philadelphia, Pa., U.S.A., from a distant galaxy, you’d know what was up the minute you swung open the door.

Chocolate. Good, virtuous chocolate. The aroma envelops you like a sweet fog as you enter Max Brenner, Chocolate by the Bald Man. Their first confectionary opened in 1996 just outside Tel Aviv, but I’d understand if you thought Willy Wonka owned this brand.

Inside, the Philly outpost (only the second in the U.S.) radiates an infectious, childlike joyfulness. Great propellers turn in tanks of ganache, creating shiny dark, milk and white chocolate whirlpools. Pipes crisscross the ceiling. Cardamom, pink peppercorns, dried chilies and cinnamon sticks crowd into glass containers with cork lids, displayed along the walls like exotic bath products. Rittenhouse housewives, University of the Arts students, Bala besties on Walnut Street shopping sprees and gay dudes on dates crowd the 115 seats in the caramel-colored bar and lounge, while freckled cartoon tykes scamper across the wallpaper in a chocolate-induced hysteria.


Spread across an eye-popping 11-page menu, Brenner boasts more than 30 sweet endings. I ate so much chocolate I actually had to order the pretty damn good grilled chicken satay—there’s an entire savory menu too, by consulting chef (and Chopped judge) Chris Santos of New York’s Stanton Social—for “dessert.”


On that menu, words like “crunchy bits” and “wafer balls” supplant “organic,” “fair-trade” and “shade-grown.” Cacao percentage is listed only for the truffles (70 percent). Bean origin isn’t listed at all (to wit: Mexico, Papua New Guinea, Java, the Ivory Coast), nor is the location of where the beans are secret-blended and turned into chocolate (a factory in Israel) before being shipped to the 20-some Max Brenner locations.


The absence of information is, at first at least, liberating. But when it eventually becomes apparent Brenner’s dessert repertoire relies on just three types of blended chocolate—white, milk, dark—palate fatigue sets in. Even the Suckao, “a small, dense, concentrated shot of rich chocolate,” was more like Hershey’s Special Dark than anything you’d call dense, concentrated or rich. Maybe the Max Brenner menu doesn’t brag about its chocolate because its chocolate is nothing to brag about? 


In this town, there’s no question: You can get better, more interesting, more challenging chocolate elsewhere. What you can’t get elsewhere are funky Ocha teapots whose spring-loaded bottoms dispense aromatic chocolate chai when set atop sleek see-through mugs; ego-boosting bathroom mirrors with “you look extremely good today” etched into the glass; servers with dispositions as sunny as radioactive buttercups; and prices this reasonable.


Together, these and countless other sweet details unlock the door to a candy crunchies-sprinkled parallel universe where every guy is a Charlie and every girl an Alice; where I was almost willing to overlook how the strawberry-white chocolate milkshake had the chalkiness of a protein shake because it arrived in a charming ceramic milkshake glass that beckoned “Drink Me” in orange block letters.


Like Bonté, Brenner does waffles in the Liege style, but unlike Bonté, these lacked the gaufre’s signature slim builds, crunchy edges and caramelized pearl sugar pockets. In the banana split version, the breakfast grids came topped with bananas and drowned in chocolate sauce, with strawberries, blueberries, vanilla ice cream and extra chocolate sauce on the side. Combined with the chocolate deluge, the cakey, heavy-as-a-phone-book waffles stuck in my throat like peanut butter, strangely more so than a decent banana-topped dessert pizza that actually contained peanut butter.


The frozen lemonades, whose electric hues looked lifted from a Crayola box, should also be avoided. The watermelon (Shocking Pink) and mint (Screamin’ Green) flavors tasted as artificial as they appeared, though Brenner insists they contain nothing more than fresh fruit, ice and simple syrup.


If I had kids, I’d take them to Max Brenner. (Nurse Jackie took her rugrats to the Union Square location in episode nine.) But I’m a grownup, darn it. My tastes are sophisticated, and I won’t be swayed by complimentary mirrors and cute, cool, adorably awesome chocolate-drinking apparatuses … No! I’m going to Naked or Golosa, where the chocolate caters to adults. Just as soon as someone wraps up an Alice glass for me to take home. ■