Remember, Blue Danube Cafe

By Mai Truong

Let me say this before I forget: chocolates need to have simpler, more absentminded-friendly names. Back to my introduction. As much as I enjoy reading the menu ahead to know what I’m getting into before stepping into a place and stepping out in silent indifference, I have a thing for places I just happen to find. Actually I don’t remember how I found this place. Was it a short walk from one of our dinner spots? Was it online? I doubt it was online because it doesn’t quite exist online yet (not to be confused with restaurants of similar names in San Francisco and all). Anyway, we went there, we saw a guy sitting at one of the coffee tables with his laptop who informed us “She’s busy but she’ll be out in a minute,” we did some sightseeing along the glass cabinets of chocolate. I did marvel at their collections of chocolate truffles and the like, but perhaps my stomach has grown bigger so it prefers something bigger than little bitty truffles. My gaze stopped at the cakes. Chocolate cakes of course. (I don’t know how old Penhryn was, but I was surprised to see that people on yelp went there for the bubble tea and not the chocolate. To me that’s like going to college to have parties. At the shop the bubble tea was way in the back and the chocolates were everywhere. Maybe they believe in affirmative action?. I digress…)

We are pretty indecisive when it comes to chocolate. We stood there, we stared, we discussed, we were close to tossing coins had we had coins. The lady came out from the back and sold some chocolate for another lady who arrived after us, meanwhile we were still trying to decide what to get. They all looked inveigling. But we were full from dinner and we had more desserts at home than we could eat, so we got only 2 pieces of cakes, whose names I can’t remember now.

This one was something ganache something. 😛 Getting that overweight son out of that box without smashing it was a demanding task, lemme tell ya.

This one was violet something. I remember the violet part because the flowers on top were purple icing. Maybe there was a hint of raspberry in dark chocolate? I can’t remember. If you’re in Palo Alto, take a walk downtown and make a swift turn into this place and take notes of the names of what you get. I’m no connoisseur to remember rococo names and all, so this is the only name I can think of for these species: Spoon-licking Good.