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June 2007

NEW JERSEY MONTHLY

THE CHOCOLATE BAR STEPS UP IN SIZE

By Eric Lenvin

New York Chocolatier Alison Nelson is sweet on her adopted Beach Haven, and vice versa.
A consummate Manhattanite who is opening a branch of her business in the Henri Bendel department store on Fifth Avenue, Alison Nelson is a beach person at heart. She grew up in Rockaway Beach, Queens. “When you come from a beach community and you’re in New York City,” she says, “you really crave the beach.”

Another thing Nelson craves is chocolate. In 2002, the year before she gave birth to her first child, she opened the retro-hip Chocolate Bar in Greenwich Village. Last summer, she opened a branch in Beach Haven. The luscious lineup of iced and hot chocolate drinks, handmade truffles, wrapped chocolate bars, and over- the- top chocolate creations was such a hit that this season Chocolate Bar has decamped to larger quarters.

If you visited the Beach Haven Chocolate Bar last summer, you won’t have any trouble finding it again. It simply moved next door, from the Victorian house at 218 Centre Street to the larger one at 220. Instead of climbing steps to a porch, visitors will now enter at sidewalk level, and after purchasing at the counter, will now have the option to nurse their treats at café tables and couches.

How did a New Yorker become a Jersey Girl? Nine years ago, Nelson’s parents moved from Queens to Beach Haven, where they live full time. Nelson’s father, Tom McGonigal, a New York City Fireman, commuted to work a few days a week. Alison visited her parents frequently throughout the year and fell in love with Long Beach Island. “It’s amazing, peaceful,” she says.

Nelson and her mother, Meg, who bakes cookies and brownies for Chocolate Bar, got to talking about starting a second shop. “If I was going to open a new store, it would have to be in a place I loved to be,” Nelson says, “And Long Beach Island is the place I love to go. It’s amazing how many New Yorkers go there. Also, people from Maryland, Washington, Philadelphia, and northern New Jersey. So I felt that Chocolate Bar would be welcome there. It’s been the best decision I ever made, both on a personal level and a business level.”

The Beach Haven branch carries more kid-friendly sweets (such as chocolate covered Oreos) than the Greenwich Village original, and more iced drinks. Then there are chocolate-covered macadamias; ice tea flavored with Valrhona chocolate and vanilla beans; unique candy bars (one filled with salty pretzel chunks, another with Key lime ganache, another made of white chocolate with lemon); and the atomic line of out-of-this-world globules, whose headliner is the Elvis (banana, marshmallow, and crunchy peanut butter, enrobed in dark chocolate). Chocolate Bar also makes its own gelato and has a popcorn stand. To satisfy the epicurious, glass panels are being installed in a section of the shop, making the baking operation visible to visitors.

The inevitable rainy day will not throw the operation off stride. The new bar features a large, flat-screen TV that will show surf movies and other family-friendly fare.

Alison Nelson’s Chocolate Bar, 220 Centre Street, Beach Haven (609-492-2577). Open noon to midnight every day from Friday, May 25, to the first week of October.