![]() ![]() The menu is a crash course in cacao, and to the untrained eye, it can be confusing. Nobody knows anything about it.”īlue Stripes opened over the summer, and it still feels like a start-up. “I mean, we consume cacao every day in so many forms - ice cream, chocolate chip cookies - but nobody knows what is the cacao fruit. “I think the story of cacao is so big,” Brenner says. But chocolate is also just one product of the cacao plant out of the hundreds that have been enjoyed throughout history. Chocolate is produced by fermenting the pods, then extracting, roasting, grinding, and processing the seeds. Theobroma cacao is a tropical tree whose fruits are football-shaped pods with a glossy and rigid exterior - usually either yellowish or reddish in color - surrounding an interior of sticky white pulp dotted with hard black seeds. The idea for Blue Stripes - a concept based on cacao rather than chocolate - sprung up as a way to help Brenner avoid further legal trouble, yes, but also as a way to spread knowledge about the plant from which chocolate is produced. His name, his likeness, and even the word “chocolate” were off limits. So Brenner’s newest business, Blue Stripes Cacao Shop, was conceived and designed at a time when Brenner, one of the world’s most recognizable chocolatiers, was legally prohibited from doing anything chocolate-related in any public endeavor. Even if I opened a Mexican restaurant, I couldn’t say that I’m behind it, I couldn’t put any chocolate on the menu … It was like I didn’t own my own face.” “Basically they crushed me financially,” Brenner says. The 2012 conclusion of the litigation resulted in a five-year exile from chocolate and a financial and emotional nadir. But when he opened an independent coffee shop, Strauss sued him for breach of a non-compete contract. (The name is a mash-up of Brenner’s and that of his former partner, Max Fichtman, although, over time, Brenner adopted the name as his own and became the brand’s avatar - hence the slogan, “Chocolate by the bald man.”) He sold the brand to the Israeli conglomerate the Strauss Group in 2001, remaining a strategic partner through the chain’s meteoric growth. Oded Brenner founded the original Max Brenner in Tel Aviv, Israel, in 1995. Instead, he’s usually a block and a half downtown, running a completely different shop, which features no gold paint, no iconography of his baldness, and barely any mention of the word “chocolate.” In fact, he’s only been there once in the last five years. However, the real Brenner is never inside. The New York outpost is just one of the 55 restaurants and “chocolate bars” scattered around the globe that comprise the wildly successful Max Brenner chain. Adorned on the outside with gilded paneling, the Brenner café serves dishes like “Chocolate Chunks Pizza” and “Max’s Famous Chocolate Mess Party for Two” to groups of tourists and parents celebrating their kids’ birthdays. ![]() Oded Brenner, inside his cacao shop, Blue Stripes.Īt the southern edge of Union Square, a stylized illustration of a character ostensibly named Max Brenner keeps a watchful eye over Broadway and the movie theater across the street. ![]()
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