Come Find Us: The Chocolate Counter Shop in Los Angeles

Most of what you can buy online arrives in a box from somewhere you will never see. We are not that. There is a counter, it is in Los Angeles, and you are welcome to stand at it.

12448 Oxnard St., Los Angeles, CA 91606. Monday through Saturday, 10AM to 8PM. Closed Sunday. (310) 928-0908.

Where that actually is

We are in Valley Glen, in the middle of the San Fernando Valley, a few minutes from North Hollywood and Van Nuys in every direction that matters.

If Valley Glen does not ring a bell, that is fair — it is one of the newer names on the map. The neighbourhood was carved out of parts of Van Nuys and North Hollywood and became an official Los Angeles neighbourhood in June 1998, after residents petitioned for a name of their own. Plenty of people here still say North Hollywood, and plenty of mail still arrives addressed that way. Both are right.

It is also home to Los Angeles Valley College and to the Great Wall of Los Angeles — a half-mile mural of California history running along the Tujunga Wash, listed on the National Register of Historic Places. If you have driven past a very long painted wall in the Valley and wondered, that was it.

Why a Lebanese chocolate counter belongs here

This is the part that is not a coincidence.

Roughly half of Valley Glen's residents were born outside the United States. The two largest origins are Mexico and, second, Armenia — and the Armenian community of Los Angeles is threaded through Beirut, Aleppo and Istanbul, carrying Levantine food traditions with it. Add the wider Valley's Iranian, Israeli, Assyrian and Arab communities and you get a corner of Los Angeles where maamoul, kenefe and halawa are not novelties. They are what people grew up eating.

So when someone walks in and asks whether the maamoul tastes like their grandmother's, that is not a rhetorical question and we do not treat it as one. It is the question we most want to be asked.

It also means the shop serves two quite different customers on the same afternoon: someone who knows exactly what basma is and wants to know whose it is, and someone who has never seen any of it and needs a place to start. Both are easy to help. They just need different first sentences.

What it is like inside

Everything is in front of you. More than a hundred and fifty chocolates and delights, individually wrapped, laid out where you can see them — sold by the quarter pound, half pound or full pound.

You point. We weigh. That is the whole transaction, and it is why the shop works the way it does. You are not committing to a box of eight things chosen by somebody else. You can take a quarter pound of four different pieces, decide which one you actually liked, and come back for a pound of that.

Ask us what something is. We will tell you, in detail, and the answer will not be marketing — we eat all of it. Ask what is good this week and you will get an honest answer, including which things we think are overrated.

Things worth asking us in person

A few conversations that genuinely go better across a counter than through a checkout field.

Events. Weddings, christenings, engagements, first-tooth parties, corporate gifting. Quantities, colours, timing, what we can and cannot match. Come in and we will work it out with you.

Colour matching. Wrapper colours vary between shipments. If you need a specific palette for an occasion, the shop is where you find out what is actually in stock rather than what is theoretically available.

What to bring somewhere. Tell us who it is for and what the occasion is, and we will put a box together. This is the thing we are best at and the thing that is hardest to do online.

Allergies. Worth saying plainly, in the shop and here: everything we sell is made in a facility that handles tree nuts, peanuts, wheat, sesame, egg, milk, gluten and soy. That applies to every piece, including the ones with no nuts in them. We will not tell you otherwise to make a sale.

Where it all comes from

The chocolates are made for us in Beirut, by a maker who has been doing this for decades. That is the whole reason the range looks the way it does — baklava, kenefe, halawa, basma, moghli, bouza ashta, snayniyeh. These are not flavours invented in a lab to seem exotic. They are the Levantine dessert table, translated into chocolate by people who eat it.

Alongside them sits the European side of the counter — mille-feuille, crème brûlée, praline, croquant, feuilletine. Beirut has been fluent in French pastry for a very long time, and the counter reflects that as honestly as it reflects the Levantine half.

Online is the same counter

Everything in the shop, we ship. Same chocolates, same prices, same packing. If you are in Sacramento or Dearborn or Sydney you are buying from the same trays.

But if you are anywhere near the Valley — come in. Bring somebody. It is a better way to buy chocolate than reading a description, and we would rather meet you.

Chocolate Counter
12448 Oxnard St., Los Angeles, CA 91606
Monday – Saturday, 10AM – 8PM · Closed Sunday
(310) 928-0908 · hello@chocolatecounter.com