I am in London and I have just done a very hard thing. I take time to decompress and regroup at Honey & Co’s relatively new Bloomsbury branch, opposite which there is a Honey & Co Pop Up branch whence, just before Christmas, I got a delicious bar of their (seasonal) Honey & Spice chocolate made by Bare Bones.
This time I am here to eat a Bloomsbury bun (orange blossom, almonds) and drink a coffee while I take in the early-morning London scenes and look at the shiny-with-rain pavements. Everyone I meet is so nice to me, as if they can tell I have done a difficult thing and am soft-shelled.
I decide to walk to Covent Garden with two aims. To find a stationery shop called Choosing Keeping, which I do and which is glorious and life-enhancing and to find a gelateria, which also sells amazing hot chocolate, called Badiani 1932, down a side street – Mercer Walk. (Badiani have a few branches, mostly in London.) This is just by the Pineapple Dance Studios where I once, in my 20s, took a jazz ballet class which rendered me unable to walk.
I order a big, thick, anaesthetising hot chocolate served in a glass cup with a handle which instantly reminds me of being in Italy even though – as if! – we never had things like this in any local gelaterie. I opt for having some pistachio sauce in it, but say no to the whipped cream. It is much better value, at £4.50, than the one I had in Danieli a few weeks ago and the pistachio lends the whole thing a gorgeous mouth feel. The jagged edges of the morning start to soften.
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