Driving past The Chocolate Girl, a small storefront shop in the multicultural Mid-City area of Pico Boulevard, one might assume it has an ethnic flavor of some sort, and it does. Located in a spot that previously housed a massage parlor only leads a passer-by to wonder what exotic wares the pink window-shaded location now holds.
The mystery was solved by a visit one morning, first by smell — the aroma of rich dark chocolate filling the air, then by sight, as a woman carefully poured the molten brown liquid into a mold shaped like a Chanukah menorah. The Chocolate Girl is a temperature-controlled chocolate factory and showroom, complete with a short, moving production line that during a recent visit was coating pretzels with chocolate, which a worker then hand-decorated with blue sprinkles as they moved along.
“I told them, this week everything has to be blue,” said Tziporah Avigayil Vojdany, the owner of The Chocolate Girl, who estimates that she produces 2,000 chocolate- and sprinkle-covered pretzels each day. On that morning, Vojdany also was supervising another candy-maker in the production of marbled chocolate menorahs (white and dark chocolate) that, like all of her creations, are certified kosher and pareve pas yisroel.
Located nearly three miles from the apex of Pico-Robertson’s other kosher businesses, Vojdany, formerly of Brooklyn, had first rented a space in the Hancock Park area, and then moved her growing wholesale business to its new location in February of this year.
In addition to the menorah, which takes two hands to hold and comes with removable chocolate dreidels instead of actual candles, Vojdany’s repertoire also includes chocolate novelties for other Jewish holidays, including masks on a stick, clowns and chocolate-dipped hamantashen for Purim, and a chocolate shofar for Rosh Hashanah. She makes lollipops decorated with “Happy Chanukah,” too.
“I also make chocolate tefillin” (an edible but not wearable treat, unless you get it on your clothes) that is hand-molded, with the Hebrew letter shin, “piped on,” said the chocolatier, who describes herself as Orthodox.
Vojdany is a graduate of Brooklyn College with a bachelor’s degree in art, and she has been known to dip marshmallows in white chocolate and then hang strings from the packaging to make the confection look like tzitzit.
Made with high-end Belgian chocolate and without any dairy products, Vojdany’s chocolates can be purchased at various kosher locations throughout L.A., including Western Kosher, La Brea Kosher Market and Ariel Glatt Kosher Market, as well as at Munchies. Vojdany also sells retail online, and she has found a market niche in custom orders for britot milah and baby-namings, weddings and b’nai mitzvahs.
Looking to satisfy tastes for chocolate beyond the Jewish market, as well as within, she recently took orders for chocolate turkeys for Thanksgiving, and she also produces some items for Christmas and Halloween, as well as for Valentine’s Day, always maintaining kosher hechshers from both Star-K and Rabbi Avner Katz.
The factory’s neighbors on Pico Boulevard have been “very welcoming,” Vojdany said, and she “doesn’t want to disappoint them,” so she occasionally sells from the showroom. One neighbor has dropped in repeatedly to buy her chocolate frogs, and others have rung her bell for Valentine’s Day hearts and roses.
“Valentine’s Day this year fell on a Shabbat. We can’t be open on a Saturday, so we worked up until about an hour before Shabbos, locked up and ran home,” she said.
Vojdany previously ran a retail chocolate shop in the hip and gentrified neighborhood of Park Slope in Brooklyn, and she trained with Michael Rogak, a third-generation chocolatier at JoMart Chocolates in Brooklyn, which has been in business since 1946. “He is my chocolate mentor,” said Vojdany, who still calls him for advice.
Vojdany was divorced and a single mother of two girls when she opened The Chocolate Girl in Brooklyn, in 2007, but she had to close her shop not long after because of the recession. She took a year off, then reopened in a new location in New York that was wholesale only, and along the way, reconnected with a previous wholesale customer, Yehuda Vojdany, owner of Munchies, the popular candy emporium and ice cream parlor in the Pico-Robertson area of L.A. The rest is a “sweet story” as she says, as the two have since married.
Vojdany said her “kids have grown up in chocolate.” Recently, her 14-year-old daughter entered a contest at her school “to make a menorah out of interesting materials, and she chose to do candy and chocolate, the best of both worlds,” Vojdany said. Her kids also come to the factory from time to time to make their own chocolate-covered pretzels, she added.
For her son’s upfsherin, the ceremony for a Jewish boy’s first haircut, at 3 years old, Vojdany made an entire alphabet of chocolate and mounted the letters on a mirror with his name on it. “After his haircut, all the kids got to pull off a letter, making Torah sweet,” she said.
Is there a difference between L.A. and Brooklyn when it comes to taste in chocolate?
“People like different things here in California,” Vojdany said. “Chocolate-covered orange peels are more popular here than in New York.” Vojdany also found peanut butter s’mores a hard sell here, but she thinks she has California “hooked” on a fluffernutter s’more variation filled with peanut butter and marshmallow fluff. She also sells kosher pareve chocolate chips, which, since Trader Joe’s stopped selling them in 2012, had been hard to find.
“Kosher is really just a perk to the chocolate that I’m making. It really doesn’t define my chocolate,” Vojdany said.
“When people think kosher [chocolate], they think low quality; they think ‘cheap.’ And that’s really just a stereotype,” Vojdany said, noting that some kosher chocolate “tastes really waxy.”
“When people say, ‘Oh, it’s kosher. Oh, it’s pareve. Oh, it must be horrible,’ I say, ‘Taste it!’ When they do, they are surprised,” she said. “I like to think that we are breaking that mold.”
For information on ordering Vojdany’s products, visit The Chocolate Girl.
