Portland-based selmelier, writer, and specialty shop owner Mark Bitterman is launching a special month-long event at The Meadow's Northwest location that puts the spotlight on one of our favorite things—chocolate.

The cacao-based culinary affair kicks off the evening of July 1 with a Chocolate Flight Night, featuring a talk by Bitterman and a special tasting for attendees. Throughout the remainder of the month, The Meadow will host a whole 30 Days of Chocolate celebration, offering chocoholics the rare opportunity to peruse and sample their towering shelves of chocolate bars—over 500 of them, to be precise—free of charge.

The salt, floral, bitters, and sweets shop features chocolates from over 50 makers—some from established Old World chocolatiers in Italy and France; others from exotic faraway places like Belize and Grenada; and still others who hail from right here within Portland’s own city limits—in a wide range of products (think raw chocolate, drinking chocolate, baking chocolate, and both traditional bars and bars filled with crunchy goodies like bacon and potato chips). 

Bitterman says he felt inspired to create the curated cacao event thanks to the global shift in chocolate production and culinary usage, where contemporary chocolate makers from around the world are refining and reinvigorating artisan production and use of the confection. In short, he wants “to give people the opportunity to taste what has happened to chocolate in the last several years.”

Indeed, while chocolate bars once represented a simple candy for plopping on top of s’mores and passing out as Halloween treats, Bitterman claims that “today we’re seeing skilled chocolate makers using cacao beans of a quality that hasn’t existed since Mayan times. It’s nothing short of a flavor revolution. Chocolate is now on par with fine wine—except that for 8 bucks you get the flavor equivalent of a $150 bottle of Bordeaux!”

That sounds like a deal to us. We’re just glad Bitterman chose July as the designated month for chocolate tasting and not February—those three extra days are critical in situations like this. Now if only we could get our chocolat tasting experience with a side of Johnny Depp and Juliette Binoche...

The Meadow
805 NW 23rd Ave
503-305-3388
Sun-Thurs, 11 am to 9 pm
Fri-Sat, 11 am to 10 pm