Sweet of the Week: Chocolate at Ada Street Chicago Restaurant

I wouldn't call myself a chocoholic by any means. I like chocolate just fine, and I have enough candy bar wrapper skeletons in my closet to prove it, but I'm not one to fawn over it and exalt it like a cocoa deity. While I do enjoy chocolate, it takes something really special and significant to stand out and make me take pause. Something like the chocolate dessert at Ada Street. Dining at Ada Street is utterly fantastic, from the revelatory fried black-eyed peas to the nugget-like lamb scrumpets, but what really stole the show from all of the above is the chocolate.

The dessert list at Ada Street reads very humbly, with only a few brief selections covering basics such as doughnuts and panna cotta. Yawn? No. Open that mouth. Order the chocolate and prepare to be stunned. It's listed as chocolate with sea salt, olive oil, and toast, a combination that sounds more than a little outre. What arrives to your table is a hulking mound of ganache-thick chocolate, glazed with a drizzle of fruity olive oil, speckled with sea salt, and adjoined by a Jenga-sized stack of toast. It's the most unusually presented dessert I've had in a long time. Or ever. The chocolate is dense and decadent, like chocolate butter, and the olive oil and sea salt serve to enhance the flavor to the nth degree. Treat it like butter and smear it on the accompanying toasts, then shove it in your mouth. Repeat until plate is clean. Order again.

(Chocolate Nirvana at Ada Street)