Oaxaca is a special place for chocolate. Breakfast chocolate and Oaxaca go together like the sky and clouds. If you’re looking to get that delicious Oaxacan chocolate in desserts, though, you’ll need to do a bit more searching. CHO & Co is a delicious place to take your search in the center of Oaxaca de Juarez.
We’ve got to be very clear about something here: Your Guide would never want anybody to think I am not grateful for the (necessary) culture that is drinking chocolate for breakfast, especially in Oaxaca. I love the distinctive flavor of Oaxacan chocolate—that mix of panela and cinnamon and almond, crushed together from the raw ingredients in a simple grinder and shaped into those wonderful discs of joy right in front of you. If you don’t live in a place where you can get your breakfast chocolate custom made from raw ingredients, you’re missing out.
However, I also like to eat chocolate at all other meals (and in between meals), so after the English-language tour of the Jardín Etnobotánico de Oaxaca I walked a few minutes, just around two blocks away, to a small shop on Humboldt: CHO & Co.
I was on the move, so I took some time to eat the layer cakes and cheesecakes with my eyes, and then grabbed a brownie paleta, a chocolate chunk cookie, and an espresso. A brownie, a cookie, and a coffee are like a language. When you go to a new bakery, and you try their brownie, cookie, and coffee, you find out if they speak your stomach’s language. The rest of their pastries likely follow the same sweet grammar. CHO & Co speaks poetry to my taste buds.
The brownie paleta was dense. Just the weight on the popsicle stick felt delicious. The milk chocolate dip gave the dark chocolate some sweetness. The cookie was a brown sugary disc transporting those thick morsels of chocolate. And the coffee was a strong punch to keep the sugar in check.
CHO & Co is easy to get to from anywhere in Oaxaca’s Centro neighborhood. You’ll almost certainly visit the Templo de Santo Domingo de Guzmán if you’re in town, and I hope you have the chance to marvel at the unique flora of Oaxaca at the Ethnobotanical Garden, so if you visit either of those, you’re practically on top of the shop.
Address: Humboldt 104, RUTA INDEPENDENCIA, Centro, 68000 Oaxaca de Juárez – Google Maps link
Hours: 12 – 7 on Mon – Fri. 12 – 4 on Sat. Closed on Sundays.
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