Meg Galus Adds Creative Confections and Pastry Perfection to Cocoa + Co.
Hack and Galus photo credit Kristen Mendiola
In September 2021 star pastry chef Meg Galus came on board as a partner at Chicago’s Cocoa + Co, where owner Kim Hack has been slinging chocolate like a modern-day Willy Wonka without the purple coat and top hat since the shop opened in 2015. At Cocoa + Co. customers can drink chocolate, eat chocolate, learn chocolate (in virtual classes), and buy incredible chocolate bars, bonbons, pastries, cakes, and confections.
An Innovative Chocolate Shop
Hack was working in marketing in the wine industry in 2001 when she encountered the concept of terroir, the taste of place found in grapes…and cacao. She realized, “there’s no wine store for chocolate. You can’t go somewhere and learn and explore and taste…so the idea was always curating a collection.” She opened the tiny shop in the Old Town neighborhood and started collecting chocolate in every form.
Her Wall of Bars represents over 100 examples of bean-to-bar artisan chocolates from around the world, and she’s constantly assessing more craft chocolate, seeking both simple single origin bars and “inclusion” bars that offer flavor additions from olive oil to kumquat. Some of the award winning artisan brands she sells include Amedei from Tuscany, Manoa from Hawaii and Dick Taylor from Northern California.
Her drinking chocolate menu is something special. Offerings include proprietary blends of varying intensity like the Fix (an off menu shot of ganache and half and half served in an espresso cup) and Classic Dark, an American style cup made with chopped chocolate that knocks the skate guards off any you might find at the rink canteen. She’s not shy about bombing her customers with cocoa butter, fresh spices (try the Rock the Casbah for 13 in one) and true flavors like pure Vermont Maple syrup or chipotle chilies.
Taking Baking & Confectionary In-House
Recently, Hack spent two years searching for the right person to unlock the chocolate factory part of her story. Hack has partners that blend and bake products to her specifications, but she wanted more. “The proprietary [stuff] is the fun part! Someone who possesses pastry and chocolatier skills together is hard to find but was essential to our growth.”
Enter Meg Galus. A mutual friend suggested Hack connect with the Boka Group pastry star, and soon Galus had bought into the business as a partner, allowing Cocoa + Co. to begin to provide fresh bakery items and confections made in house (in an offsite commercial kitchen space) by Meg and her team.
Cocoa+Co cookies photo credit Kristen Mendiola
Meet Meg Galus
Galus has worked for years on her craft. After attending Chicago’s French Pastry School where she says, “I walked in and it smelled like chocolate and I was like, okay, I’m home,” and spent five years in the pastry kitchen at the elegant Streeterville restaurant TRU, creating plated desserts, mignardises, bonbons for the chocolate tray. “We used high-end, high-quality ingredients and served guests with incredibly high expectations,” says Galus, “and it’s really good when you are learning to have that kind of pressure.” Next was her “hotel bootcamp” at the Sofitel and the Park Hyatt, where she discovered how to manage systems and people, and “learned to let go a bit--in a fine dining restaurant you try to control anything and everything.”
At the Park Hyatt in 2014, she launched a little passion project, a pop-up holiday chocolate boutique in the lobby where she offered an array of everything chocolate. “The ultimate chocolate chip cookies started there.
Everyone has very specific ideas about what constitutes the best chocolate chip cookie, right? Some people like them thin and crispy, or soft and chewy, and I’m like, I want all of that to happen in one cookie.” The miraculous result contains four kinds of chocolate, “when you are mixing this you think ‘no way this dough will take all this chocolate, but it does!’” Along with overstuffed chocolate and flakes of Maldon salt, Galus under-bakes the cookies very slightly, and when the heat carries over, she lands on that crowd-pleasing chewy crispy texture.
Next, Galus spent six years with Chicago’s restaurant powerhouse Boka Group, overseeing everything from Japanese inspired desserts at Momotaro, to cinnamon rolls at Somerset, to fantastical yet homespun ice cream sundaes at Cold Storage. A mid-pandemic conversation with a colleague helped her crystallize her vision. “If I did my own thing, what would my own thing look like? Like that chocolate boutique, it’s a little bit of everything chocolate…where we do everything--cakes, bonbons, in house.” Three weeks later, in Spring 2021, Galus took the leap to Cocoa + Co.
Cocoa+Co morning buns photo credit Kristen Mendiola
New Offerings
Galus has introduced extraordinary offerings include a morning bun she describes as a “spiral of crispy flaky yum-shush-ness” rolled with caramelized cocoa nibs and coffee, and a double chocolate croissant with delightfully bitter cocoa powder in the dough and a house-made chocolate baton in the center. Says Galus, “We cast our own chocolate bars from tempered chocolate…and snap it into bars when it’s cool.” The wondrous result—a dense, delicious chocolate bite surrounded by delicately bitter buttery pastry, an extraordinary chocolate croissant.
Hazelnut Crunch bar photo credit Kristen Mendiola
But don’t leave the counter without securing a Hazelnut Crunch Bar, the candy bar Galus describes as her kryptonite adding, “I love chocolate and hazelnut, love Nutella, so it’s a layer of gianduja, then the top layer is a bunch of crunchy stuff—rice krispies, feuillatine, chocolate graham cracker streusel, caramelized hazelnuts, and sea salt, all bound with white chocolate and then dipped in dark chocolate.” Indeed.
Says Galus, “The way Kim and I overlap in our love of chocolate, with Kim’s fine eye for craft chocolate as the end product and my love of making stuff with chocolate as an ingredient, these are our unique and parallel talents.” Willy Wonka has found a match.