Reviva & Celia's chocolate dream has come true

Almost as usual in these cases, the environment does not foretell anything about what happens inside, inside, after the doors close. The real estate - enveloping Bloomfield - is one of the most eclectic mixes in the downtown area. It combines with impressive efficiency dust and hopes of development that only some, so far, have come true. It bombards you with gray and keeps the color fan close to the chest, waving large signs of workmen's shops and garages, And it almost hides much smaller signs, of shiny workshops, as it were, because workers work inside them as well.

What betrays the plot most of all is the smell of butter, which washes over the inner street with only short pauses, in favor of the smell of chocolate of course. They once wrote a very specific song about this very specific smell, but for years it has only been maintained as nostalgia. Here, you almost forget the directions and start just following your nose.

A little twisting, a little groping, skipping a suspicious elevator, stairs to the 2nd floor, and the trap was located. Reviva and Celia, the kingdom of butter and chocolate, welcome.

Sweet kingdom Reviva and Celia

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This is a center that serves the group and its locations, but does so in a relatively unusual way, certainly different, in the industry.

It's a bit of a factory, albeit with a lot less mechanics (or, in fact, almost none) and a bit of a social hub. There are production lines here, but definitely not production lines. Things go on from here, obviously, and there is a lot of natural logistics here, but it seems that everything remains, in fact is kept, below the threshold that differentiates between a restaurant that still insists on working with its hands and an industry.

"Reviva and Celia started 36 years ago with Reviva herself, and three confectioneries next to her," repeated Michal Eshel, CEO of the group, "so you can say that our growth is definitely solid, and the development is natural. We are of course very far from that starting point, but apart from a mixer there is almost no electrical device here."

We are sitting around a round table together with the pastry chef Adi Barzilai, and these words jump out at you from every angle of the eyes.

It's a dining room, but also a conference room, and especially an "inspiration room", as they call it. There are shelves bursting with cooking and baking books by Reviva Apel ("but what you see is only half the amount, barely"), magazines with notes in her hand, a collection of wooden utensils that she devoutly cultivated in her home until she passed away, charming personal and professional photos and also a historical exhibit in the form of Rolodex - Browsing phone cards and contact information. It may not be relevant to these days and this period, but every turn of it, I checked, hides treasures and stories that no smartphone, no matter how many gigabytes it contains, can contain.

The smell of butter and the smell of chocolate, but they no longer know how to recognize this aroma and jokingly complain that there is really nothing to eat here. That is, as sweet as you want and without limit, but "real" food has to be searched for and found, and every refrigerator that is opened reveals the catch.

The handyman responsible for the current upgrade, for example, can attest to this best. He opens it, and discovers inside piles of chocolate in various states of accumulation and stages of preparation. It's fun for the random visitor. It's a lot of fun for the food writer. But he wants something to put on bread. Let's keep our fingers crossed for the success of this crisis.

The aforementioned chocolate is what brings me here in the first place, being an old dream of the women and men of Reviva and Celia, which was finally realized a few months ago in the form of a debut collection.

"We've been talking about this for years," said Barzilai, who has been with the group for eight years and is the manager of its pastry and bread department, who led the project from dream to corruption together with Michal Atlas, "We've always sold special chocolate and pralines, but we thought we could do it alone, and above all we thought we were indeed can do it."

The result spells "what took you so long". Focused and just a little rambunctious, mature but playful, "chocolate you eat in front of the TV", as you define it.

There are, for now, six tables here (dark chocolate with almonds and citrus, milk chocolate with hazelnuts, white chocolate with pistachio and crunchy raspberry, wonderful dulce-cafe chocolate, dark chocolate filled with praline pistachio and milk chocolate filled with vanilla cream), two discs in the shape of chocolate Dark chocolate filled with roasted coconut and milk chocolate with cookie chips, two long bars (dolce and white chocolate with raspberries), truffles (vanilla ganache, rum, rocha and gold) and also pieces - milk chocolate with colored lentils and dark chocolate without sugar, with almonds and roasted nuts.

"The intention was to take things we do in our patisserie," described Barzilai, "Streusel, for example we put on chocolate mousse, goes into chocolate here. Still, we needed something that set us apart from the rest."

She got to work for about two years with Reviva and describes a period of non-stop learning. "It seeped in, and now we are trying to fulfill it further, for the employees, and to live up to everything this place represents. Our customers live Reviva and Celia every morning, every day. We owe it to them."

One dream has been fulfilled, but other dreams are waiting behind him. With patience of course, at their pace, and at their pace. "We're not done with the chocolate, and we're certainly not done with other things that are running through their minds," Eshel described, "In my feeling, growth is not just more branches, but also what we manage to implement and do inside, as development. Our foot is constantly on the gas, the drive Just happens in our world."