(With my apologies to Robert Cormier, whose batshit insane books informed at least a hearty sliver of puberty, and as such, my most nostalgic of chocolate eating days.)

photo: Scott Beale/United Hemispheres, Jan. 2010

It seems like everyone is talking chocolate lately. Chocolate, like beer and burgers before it, is the latest consumer product to be run through an intense marketing sieve—netting a whole crop of ambitious artisanal upstarts. All well and good, the question for me is, “Five bucks for chocolate?!”

San Francisco-based TCHO is that $5 chocolate bar, the latest entry to a mass-tege market that has come a long way from Godiva. United’s Hemispheres Magazine dedicated serious real estate in this month’s issue to wax poetic on the company’s science-meets-art approach to chocolate making. And, that’s true: TCHO isn’t your traditional chocolatier: founded by a former NASA engineer and in San Francisco, they don’t tweak; they beta release. Where other factories run on cranks and pulleys, they use an iPhone application. In developing release 1.0 as they called it, they ‘crowd-sourced’, just like lousy news agencies do on twitter. They gave the chocolate out to everyone and gathered opinions and observations. The prevailing theme: ‘chocolatey’, which is painfully useless, given the product they were asked to survey, is, uh…chocolate. Still, crowd sourcing, iPhone apps—that’s cool, absolutely. Tons of nerd love for all that. To me, however, the most important thing isn’t some sleek package or a confusing name.

How does it taste? It is quite good, and it grows on me. There’s a fruity, bitter, dark chocolate bite that gives way to a milky, almost malt-ball aftertaste. The lingering taste in my mouth far surpasses the first bite. After the chocolate breaks down in your mouth, you get this taste vaguely reminiscent of brownies—the chocolate, yes, but that almost fudge or cake-like quality brownies can have.

Where the trend in boutique chocolate seemed to slamming crap into our chocolate a la Vosges (bacon and cheese in your chocolate, anyone?), TCHO is about a fetish for purity; no hiding the chocolate with flavors or nuts. Just really high quality, fair-trade chocolate.

Overall, $5 is a touch on the steep side for chocolate, but this is slow food. Scarfing down the whole chunk won’t satiate your appetite nor will you have a chance to appreciate all the nuance they’ve managed to stuff in here. Consider it a special treat—as chocolate always was growing up, and know that this is a chocolate that takes itself very seriously.

When my no-frills Japanese-design-wonk friends at MUJI asked me to check out their ice ball maker, I happily obliged. I had spent many an afternoon getting lost in MUJI’s bleak, minimalist stores in Osaka and Tokyo when I was in college and romping around Japan. I brought back, in addition to plenty of sake (this was very much pre-the 3 ounces-or-less shenanigans of the modern flying era), tons of MUJI goodies.

Their foray in to the US has been mostly located in New York, a few outposts within the city as well as a ‘to-go’ shop at JFK. With the help of MoMA and its’ illustrious holiday catalogs, the Japanese design firm is gaining traction stateside.

And, yes, they sent me a silicon ice ball maker. The ice ball maker replicates those big honking balls of ice so oft found in a Japanese cocktail. It’s pretty, and it’s functional: one large bolus of ice has a bigger surface area in contact with the drink and thus cools the drink quickly, but since it’s so big, it doesn’t melt as quickly, so less water in your drink. All in all, a pretty smart idea. A friend noted that a bunch of them in a punchbowl could make a powerful impression—like punch lava over rocks of ice. At nearly $12 for one, that might be cost prohibitive for most of us, and this is basically a novelty—one needn’t freeze their water in a silicon heap to create adequate coolant for their refreshments.

The folks from MUJI also sent me two other cute tchotchkes which I actually am enjoying even more—a date book that splits the day in to an AM page and an PM page. It’s a little small and my ink is bleeding through, but I like it so far. But it’s super delicate. One trip to lunch and it looked like it had been through combat.

And, lastly, the splurge: a building block toy set of the New York skyline. It is entirely useless, and I love it. Favorite piece: a wooden Guggenheim. Obviously, our fake New York has, at least, high culture. I’d been eying this for a while, but it’s not the kind of thing you ever want to tell someone you bought, namely for yourself, a young professional, living paycheck to paycheck to make it to that Andrew Bird concert. But, hey, if someone else is going to drop it in my lap, I’m free to say, it’s rockin’. I put it in my office, which has become, much like my last one in Chicago did, a collection of bric-a-brac. Tchotchkes and trinkets collected from a life in transit.

**UPDATE 1/17/10: Some have inquired how and where to get such novelties, if they are for sale. The good news is the folks at Japanese-based MUJI have now got a pretty stellar site to buy stuff within the US (ships from their NYC store), but the Silicon Ice Ball Maker has been backordered since the holidays.