A Meadow in the Midst of NYC

 While heading out to brunch, in the fairly quiet street in the very warm and sunny West Village mid morning, I came across a shop that I found oddly yet perfectly fitting to my interests. The Meadow is a perfect blend of some of my favorite things, and apparently a lot of other people feel the same way if this shop can sustain a store front in the West Village.

   

The Meadow is a shop, opened by a couple Jennifer and Mark Bitterman to express their love of fine foods and exciting travels.  They sell artisan salts from all over the world, high quality chocolate bars, bitters, syrups and other gourmet items for the kitchen, beautifully rare and different flowers and some other very interesting home-wares. It is a shop that sells some of the most coveted items and ingredients, or as they claim: A place where the beautiful, the delicious, and the unexpected are brought together.

Their chocolate selection is incredibly thorough and sorted by flavor category across each shelf.  If you want a chili chocolate, they are all in one section for your choosing.  Their focus is on dark chocolates, although they do have some fabulous milk chocolate and a few other confections.  Due to their interest in salts, they have an extensive selection of salted chocolates.

  I also really loved some of the hand-made salt bowls, some so intricate and tiny that you can fit them in the center of your palm.  While I was engrossed in the wall of chocolates, and Brian was busy getting a tutored  tasting of each of the wide range of bottled bitters in the back of the shop, we easily could have spent much longer milling about the store.  However, we had to get on our way so we left with a bottle of sour cherry bitters for our cocktail making, and a delicious Bolivian dark chocolate bar. 

 I am a massive fan of dark chocolate so I was excited to see that this was 77% organic cocoa beans with cocoa nibs and Uyami salt (I learned that Salar de Uyuni is the world's largest salt flat and located just at the crest of the Andes at an altitude of over 3500 meters).  It is incredibly dark chocolate and yet so smooth, except for the scattered tiny delicate crunch of salt or cocoa nib.

A wall of fine chocolate, beautiful salts, a back room of bitters, beautiful flowers...can I just move in?