Recchiuti at 25

Editor’s note: Today we are sharing the first part of our story about Recchiuti. Next week we bring you the exciting details about Recchiuti’s work with Astreas, a company launching chocolate into space.

Michael Recchiuti making brownies photo credit Tom Seawell

At 25, Recchiuti is still pushing forward. In an increasingly crowded market, the well-established fine chocolatier has revised its visuals and introduced a slew of new flavors. “Our longstanding customers are getting older,” says founder Michael Recchiuti. “It was time to make sure a new generation noticed us.” Gone are the seal and signature, so redolent of old Europe. “That branding made sense when we started,” he says, “since we were trying to introduce a classic European level of chocolate-making here.” But now more than ever, the company is breaking new ground.

A New Look

Recchiuti branding

For the rebrand, the Recchiuti name is no longer written in script, but all in caps in a slender, rounded font, designed by Manual Creative, a San Francisco graphic-design shop. “They took the time to really get to know Michael’ and my interests,” says Jacky, his partner in business and life, who headed up what she calls a needed facelift. And so, to reflect Michael’s background as a serious jazz musician, the letters drift up and down against the horizontal like so many notes on a score.

The new look feels less Mozart, more Motown, and last fall, he worried aloud that it wouldn’t serve them well in the critical holiday season and run-up to Valentine’s Day. He needn’t have, sales went up nearly 40 percent this past Christmas, and almost 70 percent on Valentine’s. (A privately held company, Recchiuti does not generally release sales figures, but he did say the company had done well in COVID, its online business expanding to make up for the closure of its retail locations and outlets.) 

Marking 25 Years

Over the years Recchiuti has experimented with different ways of sharing his process with consumers. This spring was standing room only at the spring’s Craft Chocolate Experience for Michael Recchiuti’s public presentation. The conference, the first post-COVID gathering, was held at the Palace of Fine Arts (one of the buildings where the Panama Pacific International Exposition was held in 1915 and the previous home of the Exploratorium science museum), and he’s giving one word in its title, Experience, a sort of Jimi Hendrix twist. There’s trippy music piped in, a soundtrack the musician has laid down, accompanied by some of the so-called singing bowls they use on yoga retreats. “I wanted a temple vibe,” he says. Read more about the Craft Chocolate Experience.

For the presentation proper, he’s collaborated with Emmy-winning San Francisco photographer and videographer Tom Sewell to produce a short film about the making of the new flavors Recchiuti is producing to mark its 25 years in the increasingly competitive high-end chocolate business.

“I wanted a reel with arguing, and gesticulating, not one that was all cleaned up,” Recchiuti says. “It was funny, people were laughing.”

There are nine new flavors marketed in, truth in advertising, boxes called Nine, and they range from ones accented with single flavors -- sesame, raspberry, cognac, cappuccino – to ones with flavor combinations – maple pecan, banana caramel, rosemary olive oil.

The last of these is my favorite – I’m surprised the loud flavor of rosemary hasn’t overwhelmed the chocolate around it, but it hasn’t – it’s all carefully melded together.

“Michael was one of the first chocolatiers in the US to incorporate savory herbs … into the chocolate profile,” Jacky, says. “He was always trying to find a nice balance with the Valrhona chocolate we use.”

Background

Michael and Jacky Recchiuti photo credit Tom Seawell

When Michael met Jacky, both were working in different parts of the Bay Area’s food industry, he as a pastry chef, and she working front-of-house at Splendido, a high-end restaurant on the Embarcadero. “We were going to meet, eventually, with so many people in common,” she said.

Michael grew up in Philadelphia in a large Italian-American family, baking wedding cakes with his grandmother, and becoming, as an adult, both a pastry chef and a drummer. There are drums in a corner of the chocolate company’s factory in Dogpatch, where he sometimes goes to drum himself into a trance, to come up with new flavor ideas. His early restaurant memories are brutal, ripped, it seems, he says from The Bear: “One chef would come at me with a knife.”

Jacky, meanwhile, came from Hawaii, working in hotel restaurants while she got her university degree in San Francisco.

Soon after they met, they married, moving East together to work at Twin Farms, a Relais & Chateau inn in rustic Vermont. “They asked me what I saw myself in five years, and I said, running a chocolate company in San Francisco,” he said. “They said, if you give us that time, we’ll try to help set you up.” With their earnings, they purchased packaging and chocolate-making machines, intending to bring them to California.

Flavor First

Recchiuti No.9 Box photo credit Tom Seawell

When I ask both Michael and Jacky Recchiuti about how their chocolates’ flavor profiles have set them apart, both focus on one of the first unusual combos, the grapefruit-tarragon flavored truffle that they introduced early and have stuck with over the years. A chef at the Vermont inn asked Michael for something to serve to clear the palette between a fish and a meat dish. “They had some grapefruits on hand, lots of tarragon from the garden. I made it into a sorbet. It was a good combination.”

One evening in Vermont, Michael got to talking on a porch with a guest, Bill Gates. The Microsoft founder gave Michael his card, advising him to get in touch when he started producing chocolates in earnest. “The company bought a lot for corporate gifts in our early years.”

San Francisco DNA

Recchiuti No.9 Truffles photo credit Tom Seawell

In San Francisco, before establishing their company, they both had other jobs. “We never wanted to take money from others,” Jacky says. “That way Michael could be in control of the flavors.”

On a tour of the factory, Michael talks about the exacting way they candy their citrus rinds and about letdowns he’s experienced when sourcing materials from others. 

Jacky’s boss at a high-end interior design store smoothed the way to another big break, presenting some chocolates to her friend Chuck Williams – and soon the truffles were in the Williams Sonoma catalog, getting national exposure.

Williams sat on the board of a farmer’s market, then located in a parking lot on Green Street, where they soon got a stall. “Being with farmers all the time also encouraged Michael to continue to use their fresh herbs and produce in our chocolates,” Jacky says.

In one period, they got on the bandwagon mingling bacon and chocolate, but they soon got off. “Our customers said this is not you,” she says.

With the legacy chocolate companies Ghirardelli and Guittard in the Bay Area’s mix, it’s long been a chocolate-makers’ mecca, a center of innovation in recent years. Recchiuti found he had little interest in what became known as the bean-to-bar, or single origin movements, taking seed here as they started their business. “I worked with [Scharffen Berger co-founder] Robert Steinberg, learning some from him, but we wanted to use reliable chocolate, working in a European style.”

Though they were directly competing with local chocolatier Joseph Schmidt, the man introduced them to a contact, the buyer at Nieman Marcus. “It wasn’t competitive like with chefs,” Jacky says. “It was always nice that way. If we could help each other out, we would.”

When the farmers’ market moved to the Ferry Building, they stayed with it, moving inside and becoming one of the first tenants of the building, as it was transformed into a temple to food – this also turned out to be a good move, putting the chocolates before the locals and visitors from elsewhere who began to flock there.

And Paris…

Asked for a career highlight, Michael speaks of Paris the way Casablanca’s lovers did – he’ll always have Paris. In the James Beard-nominated 2005 book, Chocolate Obsession Michael co-authored with food writer Fran Gage, they document a trip he and his chocolates took to Paris, to present before a group of aficionados. “It was intimidating,” he says. “I met with this woman who headed the group at the Ritz. She was bejeweled, gorgeous, a lawyer, a member of the Legion of Honor, went to school with Sarkozy.”

He would be an upstart American bringing his wares to one of the capitals of chocolate. To aid in the battle to come, he asked a well-known figure in the European chocolate world, Chloé Doutre Rousel, to help communicate with the French crowd. “She’s just this wacky, wacky woman, only tasting chocolate at like four o’clock in the morning, because she feels that the palette is perfect then.”

The group expected 100 chocolate experts to show but 230 came. “I suspected there might be more than they said, so I brought some more chocolates with me.”

There were some snooty comments – one combination made a taster nauseous – but overall, the event was a mad success, to translate literally the French succès fou, and lifted the mom-and-pop firm’s international profile several notches higher.

“While he was in France, I was here, someone’s got to steer the ship,” Jacky says.

In general, while Michael works on the flavor combinations, trying out novel partnerships, like the current one with Astreas, she manages the firm’s marketing, overseeing the recent rebranding. “I can go off in different directions,” he says. “She makes sure we stay on brand, I stay on brand. … She keeps me from completely going off the rails.” 

You could say Jacky keeps Michael grounded, but given his latest effort creating chocolate for space, that is not quite accurate.