I VISITED a luxury tasting experience at a chocolate shop in Basingstoke that promises to find your chocolate ‘love match’.
Hotel Chocolat in Festival Place is hosting a guided experience to mark Valentine’s Day, promising to help you find your chocolate love match. I was offered the experience of trying the event.
I visited with my mum, Kirsten, and both of us were excited to try it, especially with the promise of a box of chocolates at the end.
To start, we had to scan a QR code on our phones, taking us to a quiz with a number of questions, each question had two options, dictating which chocolate you would try. For example, did I prefer dark or milk chocolate for the first question? I chose milk and was offered a truffle.
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I found the quiz clunky, however as there was no Wi-Fi in the store, which meant we had to use our data, however, the signal wasn’t strong enough, so the questions struggled to load.
It also felt impersonal, we had a wonderful employee called James leading the experience, who was more than knowledgeable in every aspect, I think it would’ve been better suited if he asked the questions and then offered us the chocolates based on his opinion and expertise.
The whole session lasted about 25 minutes, which in the duration of, we were offered around five chocolates to try, in addition to any we had our eye on at the end, and some of Hotel Chocolat’s famous chocolate vodka for those over 18.
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In the end, we were all given £5 vouchers to pick whatever we liked in the store, a great deal, considering the experience cost the same. We were encouraged to pick one of the chocolate selector boxes in the flavour the quiz had matched us with, mine was milk to caramel, and my mum’s was exquisitely nutty.
We both agreed with our picks, I am slightly juvenile in my chocolate of choice, meaning that I like anything sweet, sugary and without fruit, whereas my mum loves nuts. I picked the salted caramel hearts and my mum went for the custard tart flavoured chocolates.
All in all, for the low cost of the tasting experience, the amount of chocolate that we were offered, and the box that you get to pick at the end, I would recommend it as it was fun, however, make sure you have a strong data plan.
The experience runs until the end of March.
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