I am in Philadelphia, first stop on a two-stop East Coast tour to visit dear friends I haven’t seen in way too long.  While I sit on Rachel’s bed last night and try to hash out where to go for dinner with her and Sara, Rachel enthuses about this wonderful Italian place she knows…and the amazing Mexican tapas place she’s recently become addicted to…and the brunch place we should definitely visit tomorrow…and then she cuts herself off.

“You know, my friend Linds was here a week ago, and I had made up this list of things to do in Philly, right?  And she got here and I looked at this list, and it was maybe 15 restaurants and then 3 non-food things at the very bottom, which were pretty much an afterthought as it was.  So, anyway, it has occurred to me since then that maybe not everyone wants to plan their trip based around what they’re going to be eating when and which restaurants they want to squeeze in.”

“Ha.”  I say.  What a ridiculous notion.  Poor, unfortunate souls.

And so the Great Philly Food adventure began.

Last night, the three of us went to a hip vegan restaurant, Horizon, to enjoy their creative and tasty fare.  We had the cauliflower saffron soup, the heart of palm cake, the pan-seared peppercorn tofu, the roasted autumn vegetable plate, and the Catalan Tempeh.  The food was good, with some really great sauces, though it was heavier on soy products than I prefer.  Still, there were some wonderful taste and texture combinations that got me pondering how to reinvent some of it in my own kitchen.  Then, we capped off the evening at Naked Chocolate, enjoying single-origin hot cocoa that was insanely rich and triggered a euphoric chocolate buzz the second we walked in the door and were hit by the deep, fragrant scent of the place.  Apparently you can get your hot chocolate American style or European style there, which my barista neglected to inform me.  Instead, she simply handed me a cup of thick, intensely rich dark chocolate, European-style, that brought Andalucía back in a flash.  Delicious, but dangerously so.  After all, Andalucía was where I awoke around dawn in an unobtrusive little cafe on a tiny square in Granada, chocolate smeared on my face, churro crumbs stuck to the Unicyclist’s forehead, and no recollection of the evening.

Okay, that’s not entirely true.  But I maintain my position that churros and chocolate are dangerous.  I’ll tell you the details of that story another time.  In the mean time, rest assured that I know when I’m talking about when I tell you that Naked Chocolate is amazing, but quite possibly the surest path to moral depravity in Philadelphia, available for around $4 a cup.  The best cup of the evening was probably Sara’s, which combined caramel with salt–sweet, salty, creamy, and deliciously balanced.  If you’re in Philly, that cup of cocoa is definitely worth a stop.