Because it's PARIS!!!

This is not fair. I so want a recipe after reading that description. Holy wow, it sounds amazing.

From what I understand the hot chocolate is just water and chocolate, no milk or cream in the liquid (other than what you add yourself). Since dairy can often dull great chocolate flavour, the water allows all of the flavour to be the chocolate. In fact I believe its almost a one to one ratio of chocolate to water. Divine is right!

That's it I'm recharting my life plans

If you're ever in Montreal, I do suggest the hot chocolate at Juliette et Chocolat.

I hate to be argumentative, but the best hot chocolate in the world has to be at Chocolateria San Gines in Madrid. It's thick and not meant to be drunk but to be dipped into with fat, crispy churros. It's busiest at about 4am on weekends, but just as good around 10am for a leisurely start to the day.

It is like liquid pudding- the most luscious chocolate pudding you can imagine. Pure comfort in a cup to be savored in a spectacular city. Sigh

@fi_burke A quick Google search turned up two different recipes, both purporting to be Angelina's. Recipe #1: http://www.food.com/recipe/angelina-s-hot-chocolate-334398 and Recipe #2: http://www.savory.tv/2009/12/12/paris-hot-chocolate-recipe/ As for which one is the real one, who knows but they both sound tasty!

Lemontart that is fascinating. My mother always made it with hot milk and when I got to college and tried the instant kind I actually liked it better with the water. Now I know why.

When I lived in Vermont I worked at a small Italian bakery/restaurant called Pane e Salute. Their traditional Italian recipe for cioccolata calda sounds very similar to what you tasted in Paris. From what I remember it was heavy cream, cocoa powder, and a small amount of sugar. I even want to say it had butter (gasp!) in it. Serve it with a dollop of slightly sweetened fresh whipped cream. Certainly not low fat but as a treat on a cold day, it was unsurpassable.

Best hot chocolate I've ever had is from the Four Seasons in East Palo Alto. My old employer shared an office park with them, and they serve it at their annual holiday tree lighting. I don't know that I want to know what's in it. I do know that it cools to a solid.

this post made me laugh, i love the description, and i really really want to put chocolate in my mouth right now. in fact, i think i'll just melt a bar and sip it in a cup and think about Paris.

Y U M !!!

My mother used to take us there a few times a year when I was growing up in Paris. I have to say, it might truthfully be the best hot chocolate on earth. Pastries (especially the Mont-Blanc) are not bad either...

@WeAreNeverFull, I'm with you. Angelina's sounds wonderful, but when I think hot chocolate, I think of my many slightly tipsy 3am mornings at San Gines, flirting with strangers. And omg. Churros.

Ok, this is just mean. First, that mouth watering description of the Cafe Angelina hot chocolate and then everyone posting about all the other delicious hot chocolates they've had in places it's very possible I will never get to go. And you don't even provide a recipe? This is our first cool day of the year and I was so imagining some lovely hot chocolate, but I'm sick of the instant ones and don't like Starbucks'.

You can make your own decadent hot chocolate with some good cocoa powder, cream/milk and some sugar. It seriously blows away anything you'll get in a packet.

I visited Cafe Angelina on a weekend trip to Paris during my study abroad in Florence. I ordered the hot chocolate and the cheese plate... for breakfast. Sounds like a bad combination, but it was one of the most blissful dining experiences I had in my 4 months of Europe! ( I suppose the quick jaunt over to the Louvre afterwards made it that much better too) Mm, I can still taste the hot chocolate...

Abuelita made with crappy vanilla ice cream (it tasted old/freezer burned the night it was purchased). Trashy & dreamy!

Oh my goodness, this hot chocolate was divine! My friends and I spent far too long carefully sipping every last drop. Oh, and their pastries too. So delicious!

Will someone please buy me a plane ticket to Paris. I love this hot chocolate-I was fortunate to be introduced to it 4 years ago by a lovely French woman...I will never forget it or her and long for the hot chocolate on cold rainy days in Seattle

Hot chocolate in Paris is really hot chocolate. Here, in the US, we're used to cocoa powder and hot water. They use real milk (their fat content is different) and sometimes cream, dark chocolate. It's all I make at home. Even as a kid, I would warm milk and add my Swiss Miss, before I knew any better.

i visited Angelina last year but no one told me about the hot chocolate! i'm kicking myself now for not trying it! wonder if i can make a good one at home with just chocolate and water as suggested? Mmm...

I had to register just to post about the best hot chocolate - my own invention :)
You'll need a double boiler (or, as I do it, a bowl over a pot of boiled water) and a whisk.
Start off with some good quality dark chocolate (I like to go for 85% here), about a teaspoon of sugar (you don't want it too sweet), some cinnamon or chilli or spice of choice if you want (be inventive :)), and a teaspoon of water into the bowl. Let the chocolate melt, and once you can mix it all together, you want to add the liquid. This is where you choose how fattening you want to make this... The least will be full cream milk, but I've made this with a mix of cream and milk, just the cream, and a mix of ice cream and milk when there was no cream...
Add the liquid and whisk whisk whisk, still on the double boiler.
Warning: This hot chocolate is decadent (but not sweet) and can only be drunk in small quantities (unless you're my boyfriend) :D

Anyone been to Rivoire, in Florence (Italy, for you Americans)?

The hot chocolate there is quite as described in the article: hot, velvety, strong, thick, but the cream it's served with isn't whipped.

Extraordinary, even if it's a massive tourist trap.

http://www.rivoire.it/

Um, I think it's safe to assume that us Americans who read thekitchn know Florence is in Italy. Thanks.

Thanks vmorgs! I will definitely have to try those!
I grew up drinking hot chocolate (milk +nestle chocolate mix) almost every day before bed, and as an adult started making decadent melted Ghiradelli + cream + Whole milk. I just wish i lived in a slightly more hot chocolate friendly climate so I could indulge more often!

What delicious memories you bring back. Dark chocolate is the main ingredient. Here are two recipes I found:

http://www.savory.tv/2009/12/12/paris-hot-chocolate-recipe/

http://chowhound.chow.com/topics/281536

SIGH.......adding it to my list.

Oh, hot chocolate. One of my favorite topics. And just this morning I was watching the old short film The Red Balloon with my kids and dreaming of going to Paris (I've never been).

When I lived in NYC, I had a whole tour in my head of the city's best hot chocolate that I would suggest to anyone visiting, but most people weren't as, ah, passionate about it as I.

Now I'm in Minneapolis and haven't found any truly amazing hot chocolate (has anyone else?), but I can at least go to my favorite specialty food store and buy tins of MarieBelle hot chocolate, shipped in from the chocolatier in New York.

Another guilty pleasure that I discovered by accident is to buy Alden's organic chocolate chocolate chip ice cream and melt it and drink it as hot chocolate. It's pretty amazing.

Sorry to be the one dissenting opinion. I went to Angelina's last November and it was good for the first few tastes. It was too much for my tastes. Although my daughter who was 15 months loved their sweet milk warmed to the perfect temperature. The hot chocolate was so sugar coma inducing that I craved meat when I left just to settle my stomach.

Angelina's uses fine dark chocolate bits for their hot chocolate, NOT cocoa powder! I know because I purchased a bag there and brought it home. When you open the precious bag of deliciousness you can see it looks like pure ground chocolate, and it's pure heaven. They give you directions on the bag, but I can't remember if it was a water or milk preparation.

my husband makes really delicious hot chocolate by melting a very good quality chocolate bar, adding full fat milk and stirring , stirring, stirring.

we also had some wickedly expensive and fantastically delicious hot chocolate in e. wedel in warsaw. it came with many optional add-ons and i chose the sour cherry. as odd as it sounds, it tasted like a sour cherry chocolate fondue with whipped cream on top - divine!

this post inspires cravings, but apparently also inspires the inner chocolate lover. these comments are so Fun to read!! i am going to make the version "haiku" explained her comment. except i will accompany mine with a small blob of fresh whipped cream a la Angelina!

Anthony Bourdain's blog has something close:
http://almostbourdain.blogspot.com/2009/06/paris-angelinas-chocolat-lafricain-hot.html

Paris Angelina's Chocolat L'Africain (Hot Chocolate) Recipe
(adapted from Hot Chocolate by Michael Turback)

Ingredients
3/4 cup whole milk (full cream milk)
1/4 cup heavy cream (I use double cream)
1 tsp confectioners' sugar (icing sugar)
4 oz / 125 g Omanhere bittersweet chocolate, 72% (you can use any brand of bittersweet chocolate)
Whipped cream

Method
1. Combine whole milk, heavy cream and confectioners' sugar and heat over medium to high heat until bubbles appear around edges.
2. Remove from heat and add chocolate that's been chopped.
3. Stir until melted (you may need to return it to low heat).
4. Serve with whipped cream.

Oops! AlmostBourdain not Anthony Bourdain

That, with Angelina's Mont Blanc ! Ca Bon!

House of Pies in Houston serves their hot chocolate in little individual kettles. You pour it into your own mug, which comes ALREADY FILLED with whipped cream. It's not Paris by any means, but at 3 in the morning, it's pretty damn fantastic.

I make my own decadent hot chocolate with one ingredient no one has mentioned: cornstarch. The recipe originally came from Joy of Cooking, I think, years ago, but as far as I'm concerned it's the best. The rest is cocoa powder, sugar, water, milk and vanilla. And let me add that I go through a couple of tubs of cocoa powder in the winter b/c of this recipe.

European hot chocolate derives from the 17th and 18th century ways of drinking hot chocolate - melting the unsweetened chocolate bars and serving with sugar and cream - much like coffee (shocker, considering the popularity of coffee and chocolate houses). Of course, in the 18th century they often added all kinds of spices to the chocolate as well.

I think I'd get chocolate overload drinking a giant pitcher of lightly watered melted chocolate. I think I'd want lots of hot milk with a little chocolate and sugar in it. :)

sitting at my desk at work craving hot chocolate. if i'm lucky i'll be able to scavenge up a nestle packet. sad day.

that said, there is a place in st. louis called 'the chocolate bar' that has pretty amazing hot chocolate (and assorted chocolate alcoholic beverages).

What a tease! I shouldn't even be thinking about hot chocolate for dietary reasons.

But I must share that the best hot chocolate I ever made at home was a complete accident and something I never did again: I was trying to soften up some Ben & Jerry's and overdid it, ending up with the most delicious pint of creamy chococate bliss. And since it was ruined as ice cream, I had to curl up with the whole pint. :)

The best hot chocolate I've ever had was in Jerusalem of all places. I was whisked off to a university cafe for a quick meal. I hadn't worked out the shekel/australian dollar exchange rate and ended up paying $8 for the thing, about twenty years ago.

The cafe was in a plastic marquee with plastic tables and what seemed like plastic everything. I was not impressed. Liquid was dripping from the ceiling where it was drooping, just near where I was sitting. I was convinced that the liquid was made of the patrons condensed and evaporated sweat.

But in the most unattractive setting I had the best hot chocolate of my life. Something you'd think only Enid Blyton could conjure up in one of her stories but I was having it for reals. A hot chocolate that sat half way between a chocolate mousse and a delicious hot chocolate. It was thick and moussey, it was chocolatey, it was thick yet drinkable, it was liquid yet you could eat it with a spoon. Though good at reverse engineering food, I could not for the life of me work out what gave it this wonderful texture.

I've never ever come across a hot chocolate anywhere near that delicious concoction... I've tried millions of recipes and just cannot reproduce it.

I'll never forget you my beautiful Jerusalem university makeshift cafe hot chocolate love.

erinhatfield, I never knew that. I've only ever tried the pie at House of Pies, but I'm not much of a pie person so I've only been a couple times. I'm gonna check out that hot chocolate when it gets cool again.

We absolutely loved the hot chocolate at Angelina, too! It was one of the reasons I wanted to visit Paris (along with the excellent macarons). We also took some photos to remind ourselves of how wonderful it was: http://www.flickr.com/photos/25282691@N04/3630412217/in/set-72157619783150904/

Here in the US, I like drinking LA Burdick's hot chocolate at their two cafes in Cambridge, MA and NY. They were my first introduction to real hot chocolate and I realized many years ago I could never go back to powdered. Their hot chocolate is very rich but not too sweet (I do not recommend drinking it on an empty stomach, though).

These days, I just make my own hot chocolate using milk, Valrhona dark chocolate (at least 70% dark), sometimes cream, and a little sugar. I bought Michael Turback's Hot Chocolate book, full of good recipes and useful hints. Once you understand the basics, it's very easy to customize your chocolate with cardamom, ginger, lavender, or other spices.

Thanks so much for the heads up on Angelina. I went to Paris for the day and headed straight there. Best hot chocolate ever! Heaven in a cup!

The breakfast is awesome in general, but the hot chocolate is AMAZING. My husband and I have a passion for hot chocolate and get it everywhere we go. This one is now our favorite (previous best we'd had was in Granada, Spain). We bought the mix there as well and have just tried it. It's the best we've ever made at home (and we've made a lot, both from scratch and gourmet mixes). Definitely go to Angelina if you ever have the chance, and also bring home the mix! I'll fill my suitcase with it next time :)