The humble hot chocolate has come a long way from the days of Nestlé powder. We're particularly spoiled here in Melbourne, with venues taking to mugs of gooey, molten chocolate with the same sort of all-consuming fixation usually applied to coffee. In need of a sweet fix right now? Warm up at one of these spots around town for Melbourne's creamiest and most delicious hot chocolates.
Who says you can't take hot chocolates to the next level? Order the Campfire Chocolate at Mörk’s concept store and you'll get a smoke-fogged stemless wine glass, served with a little beaker of hot chocolate, plus smoked salt and a toasted marshmallow. This is everything but classic.
This cafe-cum-winebar is not just about sandwiches and pre-dinner drinks. Heartattack and Vine are serving up a Spanish-style hot chocolate for grown-ups built on a house-made ganache and married with a spicy and fragrant chilli-orange syrup. Think a liquid Jaffa with a hint of heat.
Pidapipo Laboratorio, a fabulously fun and Willy Wonka-esque destination, needs no introduction for serious dessert devotees. And now that winter's here, its internet-breaking hot chocolate is back for a limited time only. The recipe features a generous amount of Pidapipo’s signature housemade fior di latte gelato (made from Jersey Milk from Warrnambool), and is laced with marshmallow before being scooped into a rich hot chocolate made from Pidapipo Cioccolato’s 46% single-origin milk chocolate and caramelised sugar. To garnish, a croccante (a crunchy Italian brittle with nuts) made from Piedmontese hazelnuts adds the perfect layer of crunch on top of your hot chocolate. You'll find it available for a limited time at the Fitzroy and Windsor stores only, for just $9.50 a cup.
Get your hot chocolate the traditional Colombian way: served in a little jug, and then showered with crumbly queso. Yep, cheese in your chocolate. Don't think about it, just do it.
The internet's currently going wild for the S'mores-inspired hot chocolate from this hot new Thai desserts cafe. A $9.50 cup is filled with steaming chocolate, sweet marshmallow fluff and a tasty cracker – and yes, it's as yummy as it sounds! Grab a friend and head to Little Lonsdale Street to check it out.
Black Star Pastry, home of the wildly popular (and extremely 'grammable) strawberry watermelon cake, is also a much-loved destination for another treat: its astonishingly good hot chocolate. Inspired by their famous Chocolate Mirage Cake, the delicious butterscotch-flavoured elixir features rooibos tea, caramel and Madagascan Manjari chocolate.
Silly spelling shennanigans aside, Chokolait is a magical portal, via its espresso bar-style hole-in-the-wall frontage, to absolute bliss. They dish out some outrageously decadent chocolates, and of course, make their famous hot chocolate using only Belgian's finest.
This artisan chocolatier sticks the better part of a block of its finest dark choc into your mug here. And because it's winter, and why the hell not, staff can whack in a good pinch of chilli to cut through the rich chocolate if you want. Hot in every sense of the word.
From both a beautiful little shop in Mordialloc village and an alley stall at Prahran Market, Guras Cacao offers premium artisanal chocolates and hot cocoa made with love. Breathe in the aroma of smoked wood chips, as your chocolatier prepares a cacao, chilli and salt concoction behind the counter or try a signature hot chocolate with classic marshmallow. For more info on how to find the Prahran Market location, go here.
Hardware Société is arguably one of Melbourne's most iconic laneway cafés, thanks to its decade-long tenure amidst an unpredictable hospo scene and its perennially popular brunch dishes (croque madame, anyone?) keeping our bellies full throughout every season of the year. But what you may perhaps not know is that this eatery is home to one of the greatest hot chocolates in town. Named the 'Velvet Blanc Hot Chocolate', this version comes with 33.5% premium callebaut chocolate, lychee, rose and ganache. Bougie? Okay, a little. Delicious? Unforgettably so.
Dubbed an "urban beer garden hideaway", Riverland is situated on the banks of the Yarra in the historic Federation Wharf vaults, making it an ideal starting point for a voyage into the night. When the weather gets cold, the bar brings back its OG boozy Milo cocktail – a decadently hot alcoholic drink with dark rum, maple syrup, oat milk and a generous swirl of cream. You can follow up with other boozy winter warmers, too, like the Biscoff coctail and tumblers of Riverland's famous spiced mulled wine.
We’ve had burgers. We’ve done dawgs. We’ve crammed in more ribs than we want to think about, and now here’s Bowery to Williamsburg: the new, New York-inspired eatery that’s rounding out the US food craze with fat lox bagels. But you can also get a dang good hot choccy here, courtesy of its premium 'Koko Deluxe' cocoa blend from West Africa and a peanut butter hot chocolate that's well worth the sugar coma.
This Vietnamese-style hot chocolate is not like your average hot chocolate. It's made from Marou chocolate — a single-origin, sustainable, Vietnamese chocolate — and whipped together with free-range egg yolks, vanilla and condensed milk to create a fluffy and silky beverage.
This high-tea salon is so sleek, so modern and glittery, it’s like a spaceship with cake. We wouldn’t have batted an eyelid if it took off for planet Pastry while we were inside it. Bibelot is an ambitious proposition: espresso bar, gelateria, pâtisserie, café, chocolate shop and 'library'. You can spy on the chocolatier tempering away in the chocolate room, sit on the stylish-but-stark seats at the front and spy on Coventry Street, or occupy the emerald-green sofa in the café space at the back. On the hot choccy front, you can choose between a 34% milk chocolate or a 64% dark chocolate.
The free tastings are probably all you need to convince you to stop off at this land of sweet delights. Located in the Yarra Valley, this chocolate and ice cream studio is set on a beautiful property which means that if you do stuff yourself stupid on ice cream (they use a lot of native ingredients and produce from their kitchen garden, FYI), or at the café, at least you can walk/roll it off a little bit before pouring yourself back in the car. Oh, and of course, there are hot chocolate flavours galore, so be sure to bring the whole family along and go nuts.
You can't call yourself a true Melburnian until you've wolfed down the Italian-style hot chocolate at Brunetti Classico – an intensely sweet bowl of chocolate mud so dark its bordering on black and so thick you could stand a spoon in it.
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