A physicist walks into a chocolate shop … not a joke, but the beginning of the one of most inventive lives in the chocolate world.
I’m deeply fortunate to have met master chocolatier Rich Tango-Lowy four years ago as we were moving to New Hampshire. Since then, in the many times I have stopped in his shop, Dancing Lion Chocolate, a half hour away in Manchester, I’ve walked away knowing something new.
Rich is about to close up shop after twenty years in business and move on to the next phase of his life, fueled by the same curiousity that has made Dancing Lion the most creative chocolate spot in America.
I spent part of an afternoon recently asking Rich about his journey and feel compelled to share a bit of it with all of you who appreciate fine chocolate.
You notice the look and feel of Dancing Lion chocolates right away. It carries through everything they make and the honesty with which it is presented.
So the physicist part … Rich did start out in physics, then got into tech, then ultimately got bored. He didn’t actually walk into a chocolate shop, he started one, buying a building on the main street in Manchester, the largest city in New Hampshire, but still with only 117,000 residents, making it only the 251st largest city in the US.
How is it that one of the most expensive chocolate shops in the country thrives in Manchester, I asked? “Manchester is an old brick city”, said Rich. “Mill buildings fronting the river. It has a feeling of solidity, solidity that helps us. There’s an integrity here.”
“When people are buying food, what they really want is integrity. When they ask ‘is it fair trade?’ what they are really asking is ‘is there integrity here?’ Manchester and its context sets a tone of integrity for us. Our customers are everyday people; they’re not snobby or pretentious and everyone who interacts with us knows we’re here to have a good time.”
Dancing Lion's bonbon sharing boxes. The contents are always changing.
“Long ago, I worked in a wine shop and learned some important things. People are terrified in wine shops, worried they don’t know anything. The most important job in a wine shop is to make people feel comfortable; make them not feel like idiots.”
“The same thing can happen in a chocolate shop. The whole experience at Dancing Lion is about making people feel comfortable to walk in. There’s no pressure here. Whenever someone comes in, we engage with them right away and just tell them about what we do. We don’t make things that we don’t like ourselves and they see the integrity in that. Trust the customer. And they’ll respond.”
“It is one of the most important things I learned,” said Rich, “trust your customers. Most people underestimate their customers, I think. Share your genuine story with them and they’ll see the truth in that.”
For the past several holiday season's, Rich's mother, artist Laurie Lowy, has come into the shop and painted one of a kind bars of chocolate with colored cocoa butter. She sits at a table out front and paints and chats with customers. These have been some of the most expensive bars of chocolate one can find anywhere, but they have been in Manchester, New Hampshire, and they disappear rapidly.
Beyond this attitude, there are many other things that have made Dancing Lion a different kind of chocolate shop. One is that the flavors and varieties of the bonbons or truffles are different every time you walk in. Rich says he has never made the same bonbon twice. That means that over almost twenty years, Dancing Lion has produced thousands of varieties of bonbons in small batches.
“I really want to understand how a truffle works and to do that you have to constantly change it. It came out of my view of science and my belief that if you’re not consciously getting better, you’re getting worse. You get stagnant, so if you force the business to constantly change, constantly improve, you avoid that.”
"We make a recipe only once and then move on," wrote Rich on Instagram. "This year's strawberries are top-notch. I paired them with the herb savory from my home garden, and am using Volker Lehmann's magnificent Tranquilidad wild heirloom cacao from Bolivia for the ganache. They'll be truffles for the weekend and next week."
There is also a unique look and feel to all things Dancing Lion, from the appearance of the shop to the chocolate itself. “The most interesting things we’ve ever done are where things break a bit and rather than hiding it, we keep a rough edge and make it beautiful. We don’t polish our molds, we layer in color upon color and it gives a texture that’s special and different. Highlight the break, don’t hide it.”
Bean to bar chocolates of remarkable flavor and texture, all made in house.
There’s no one who has approached chocolates and chocolate itself in the way Rich has. He took another leap in 2020 during the pandemic and decided to started producing his own chocolate couverture – the particular type of fine chocolate, rich in cocoa butter, used for coating bonbons, making ganache, and creating fine pastries.
Most chocolatiers use couverture produced by chocolate makers. Rich got the idea that producing his own could be both more interesting and save money. “We learned a ton in the process – a lot about fermentation. We did experiments in Belize. We published a paper on cacao genetics. We get crazy interesting cacao beans and learned how to process different beans in different ways.”
Those of you who buy my own chocolates have been benefitting from this for the last year—and there’s more to come. I tasted one of Dancing Lion’s couvertures a while back and the complexity of flavor blew my mind. I’ve been buying couverture from Rich ever since. I knew Dancing Lion would be closing in October, so in July I asked Rich and Roger Balcom to put together a group of interesting couvertures for me. Shortly, I’ll be picking up about 75 kilos of eight different remarkable varieties, enough to make great bonbons throughout this coming season.
Rich remarked “Some people don’t think the chocolate itself is that important. That’s crazy. Our first job is the chocolate. That’s what matters here. Using good chocolate.” I concur.
Working with Rich, Roger Balcom makes Dancing Lion's exceptional couverture. As I've acquired a good amount of it, you'll be tasting it in ganaches and giandujas throughout the coming season.
I asked Rich what he was most proud of from his work so far. This may sound a bit self-serving on my part, but here’s his answer. “People like you. I’m not worried there won’t be good chocolate here. We had a part in that. All the people who have taken the Ecole Chocolate ganache class [like me], were really taking a ‘how to be adventurous in flavor class.’ We’ve made it more subversive in a way, and I’m really proud of that. We put out some pretty damn edgy stuff.”
Mexico Almendra Blanca 75% dark milk and Soconusco 70% dar chocolates with arbor chiles and sea salt. The poem accompanying it (one of thousands Rich has written for bars and bonbons):
Turn up the Heat / Melt the ICE / Mexico with a hell of a lot of chiles.
“How many vanillas do we have? Each one is like a different ingredient. How many peppers? We use them in different ways; each is a different flavor. I was going through our website and there’s some crazy stuff. I put three seeds of cumin in a bar of chocolate and make it a surprise in there. When you hit one it blows your mind. The same with a peppercorn.”
It's true. I had a bite of the bar and it just so happened I hit the cumin seed and it was transformational.
Rich’s influence on me is significant. When I’m making a ganache, I often think “How would Rich handle this?” He says, “What does this ganache want? We craft a bonbon in our minds, but then it goes where it wants. It’s really a collaboration. How do all the pieces fit together?”
And that, I told Rich, is why so often now, I can’t really predict the flavors that will be in one of my collections. I will have some ideas. But, they change in the process of tasting the couverture, or the fruit, or the nuts. What do they want? I don’t know until that point.
With Rich at Dancing Lion, not long ago.
“It has been so much fun,” Rich says. “We do our own thing. I’m proud of that. We don’t advertise. We keep our heads down. We don’t apply for awards. We just make stuff and people buy stuff. We try to make stuff that is true to us.”
“And I feel like your style is true to you. It’s beautiful. And when I say beautiful, it’s not just the look, it’s the flavors, everything is thought out and works together, the bonbons are an experience to consume—and that’s not that easy to do or easy to find -- and I taste a lot of chocolates.”
So Dancing Lion closes on October 2. But Rich is not leaving the chocolate world. He will continue to teach for Ecole Chocolat, a school that has transformed so many chocolatiers and chocolate makers, including me. And he continues as President of Heirloom Cacao Preservation, working to support farmers in bringing the finest flavor rare cacaos to people like you who love good chocolate.
I should end by quoting Rich’s announcement of the closing of Dancing Lion. He did it in true form, through a poem—one of the thousands he has written to accompany bonbons and bars these past 20 years:
THE WORK IS FINISHED,
The last word is said;
The poem has been written and read.
Crafting my last bonbons,
Molding my last bars.
October 2nd end of day
We’ll put things away
Turn out the lights
Lock the doors and
Be on our way.
