Fort Smith Find: "World's Finest" Chocolate Almond

I’m behind on my posts! Trying to get caught up... First up:

Last week I took a trip to Tulsa and Little Rock for a project I’m working on – I flew into Tulsa, rented a car, worked all day, and then drove the four hours to Little Rock to work the next day. Not knowing if there would be a single bite of interesting food in the great expanse of nothingness between Tulsa and Little Rock, I tasked Andrew with finding out if there was any dinner to be had, and boy-howdy did he ever come through.

He flagged R&R’s Curry Express in Fort Smith – an Indian place with stellar reviews and a closing time 45 minutes after I’d be passing through the tiny township. The GPS led me a merry chase, insisting that the restaurant was, in fact, an hour north in Springdale (it was not), and that it was closed (it was not), but when I finally located the place sharing a building with a small independent gas station it was everything I was hoping for.

Papdi chaat - crispy bits of fried naan suspended in an amazing soup of spiced yogurt, tamarind, and mint chutney *swoon*

Having a company card and a slightly exorbitant daily food budget, I ordered the papdi chaat appetizer which showed up looking like a delicious Indian stew, with crunchy chips of naan suspended in a sweet, complex, creamy, delicious sludge of mint and yogurt and goodness knows what all else. It was divine, and unlike anything I’d ever had before. As I was still trying to navigate it, a man sitting and eating dinner with his family at the table next to me, called out to me gently in his lilting Indian accent – “ma’am, excuse me. You’re supposed to mix it up. Mix it all up, add a little salt, and eat it with a spoon – it’s good!” This was the point where I noticed he was wearing an apron, and realized that I was in the presence of the restaurant owner.

What ensued, was a thoroughly delightful meal. The malai kofta was delicious, the mystery appetizer was crazy good, and I got to know the gentleman and his wife who own both the restaurant and the gas station next door. They moved to Fort Smith from LA almost 10 years ago, looking for a small town to raise their kids in, opened the gas station, and then decided to expand their operation when the space next door opened up. These hard-working entrepreneurs happily conversed with their kids in fluent Hindi, the daughters regularly came by my table to top off my iced tea, they all assured me that staying past closing time was absolutely fine, and, as I was winding down and looking for the check, the second daughter appeared at my table with a box of chocolate, asking if I’d like to buy a bar to help her school purchase new computers.

Yes. Yes, indeed, I would.

I retrieved the last of my cash from the car, purchased a bar, and got back on the road to Little Rock.

One of the things I love the most about traveling is finding little hidden gems and supporting local businesses with my reimbursable dollars. This was exactly the kind of place that I truly love giving business to. Right down to the young chocolate seller running out to my car after I left to make sure that I’d gotten a straw with my to-go iced tea, this restaurant is awash with the delicious food and lovely, personable feel that makes me really look forward to the next time I get to drive through Fort Smith. Hopefully next time I’ll get to visit more than 30 minutes before close.

Item: Almond 

Percentage: Who knows! Probably in the 20s, if I had to hazard a guess

Made By: World’s Finest Chocolate 

Made in: Chicago, IL   

Purchased At: R&R's Curry Express 
Purchase Price: $1

Review: This is pretty much an almond Hershey’s Kiss in bar form, but maybe a little heavier on the vanillin and a little lighter on the chocolate than Hershey’s. Sugar content is about the same. Strong notes of vanillin, powdered milk, and nostalgia. As Andrew said, “It’s the finest World’s Finest Chocolate I’ve ever had.” Not exactly a bar for chocolate snobs who are hung up on cacao content (*ahem*), but a perfectly reasonable nibble for dessert or to take the edge off an afternoon sweet tooth. The one thing the bar really gets right is the size – at just 1.3 ounces it’s quite small, but the size is actually about perfect for how sweet it is, and the bar is divided up into four nice, bite-sized chunks, making it easy and enjoyable to demolish. Plus, it’s for a good cause!

Chocolate Bar: Meh

R&R’s Curry Express in Fort Smith, AR: Highly Recommend

With Love, Kat

A Retrospective in Cheap Chocolate: Lindt Intense Orange

Disclaimer: this post might seem excessively verbose and irrelevant at first, but it all ties into the theme of this particular bar of chocolate and how it affects me personally. Stay with me.

      Rosebuuuud.    *Snow globe shatters on the ground*.

A little bit less than one year ago I was living a mere two blocks away from the ornate, old house where I live today. A small, darkly-lit, but nicely furnished two-bedroom apartment above a fancy diner was the place that I called home, and I shared that home with a good friend, who also happened to be my other good friend's girlfriend (which was not a weird situation, as it seems to be in writing). The place had charm and character. There was a large red brick wall which divided the kitchen and the living room, and it looked as if it had been through several wars and just as many re-modelings.  I was often awakened at 7:00am by the staff of the diner below, who liked to blast the same upbeat polka music at extreme volume every single morning while preparing the kitchen for a day's work.

Also, within the red brick walls of that village apartment, I experienced the harshest winter of my life (which doesn't mean a lot coming from a Texan, but most of the New York locals agree with me). The cold, precipitation, and wind chill were as bitter as they were unrelenting, and most of the regular activity in my life was slowed to a sluggish, groaning halt; gigs were few, and they were often cancelled due to weather conditions; my regular job of teaching music was snowed-out half the time, and when it wasn't, only half of my students would show up on any given day; traveling anywhere in the region was a pain in my freezing posterior, if not outright hazardous; on top of that, my roommate was very often gone for days at a time. 

Many people would have had an awful, cabin-feverish time in that situation, but that was not the case for me. On the contrary: it was one of the most interesting and creative times in my memory. I managed to split my seemingly-infinite free time equally between work (music practice, composition, writing, art) and play (daydreaming, reading, talking on the phone, sleeping in, the occasional movie), and each one inspired and sustained the other. It was one of the few times of my life when I had a very regular routine which I lived by; the beauty was that abstract thinking and artistic productivity were included in the routine! Patience without indolence; structure and abstraction; focus and freedom; poetry and prose; it's the only time that I've sustained a disciplined-but-bohemian lifestyle like that for any extended period. In many ways it was a dream-come-true for an artsy introvert such as myself.

Of course, the winter came to an end, as did my lease, and that era of my life; I moved a block-and-a-half away, to the spare room at my friend's place (the aforementioned ornate, old house which I live in now). It was such a short distance to move that I could have walked all of my stuff over from one place to the other in less than a day, but the mere block-and-a-half of concrete and cracked stone sidewalks that separates me from my old apartment seems to be a much farther distance, because, to me, it represents the distance between two chapters of my life. A lot has changed since then, and it often seems as if the vague memories of a year ago are the memories of another person; another life; another set of motivations, impulses, desires, and capabilities. Nostalgia has never suited me, and I very rarely hold on to objects purely for sentimental value; there's too much real value in the here-and-now. That being said, meeting a stranger from my past, or a taste or smell from years ago, can trigger something deeper, darker, and more irresistible than any bar of chocolate: the memory of being another man.

One of these memories is of the only decent bar of chocolate sold at the village grocery store during the harshest winter: Lindt Excellence Intense Orange. Consequently, it was one of the chocolates I ate all winter. It was usually accompanied by a steaming mug of spiced black tea, and a long session of songwriting.

 Item: Lindt Excellence Intense Orange Dark Chocolate

Made By: Lindt and Sprungli Inc.

Made In: Stratham, NH

Purchase price: $2.50

Review: Firstly, this is cheap chocolate. Very cheap. It's made by a massive, mindless, corporate, chocolate-making machine with a yearly revenue of more than 3 billion Swiss francs, and a work force of more than 10,000 people. The recipe has been maximized for price-effectiveness and consistency. They over-roast their beans to cover up their mediocre quality; this process leeches the character from the beans, and makes each batch perfectly consistent. They add exorbitant amounts of sugar to hide the coarse, over-processed flavor of the beans. The 'orange pieces' in the ingredients list are actually a homogenized and hardened pulp of oranges, apples, sugar, thickening agents, and the blood of a virgin. Long story short: this is one step up from a Snicker's bar in quality.

But I love a good Snicker's bar. And I love this. The flavor is a blunt and sugary mix of almond and orange; the chocolate flavor is barely noticeable, and I'm surprised that they can get away with calling this 'dark chocolate'. There's no subtlety to it at all, but there's a joyful, purely-indulgent character to it. It's candy, plain and simple, and the quality is actually very high, considering the price point. When people want candy, they're usually looking for one thing: sugar, with some other stuff added in. That's what this bar delivers, while simultaneously being half-decent chocolate.

Cream of the crap, ladies and gentlemen.

-Will