North Fork Chocolate opens new stores in Riverhead and Mattituck

Steven Amaral’s two North Fork Chocolate Company shops can barely contain his creativity. The chef and his partner, Ann Corley, opened the sprawling Mattituck location in February and the smaller Riverhead storefront the following month. Both sell Amaral’s handmade chocolates and desserts, plus waffles and coffee. In Mattituck, you’ll also find homemade ice cream and fudge, and a gallery of local artisans; Riverhead has a cafe menu of savory vegetarian dishes.

Back in 2012, Amaral was at loose ends. His summer was booked with catering jobs but the stretch of calendar from November to April looked worryingly sparse. A lifelong meditator, Amaral “put it out there to the universe: ‘What should I do in the winter?’ ” The universe responded with a single word: Chocolate.

The next year, he and Corley founded North Fork Chocolate Company, making their confections at the Stony Brook Incubator in Calverton and selling them at events and through their website. They opened their first brick-and-mortar location in Aquebogue in 2015, but that lease ended last year. They opened the Mattituck store to be right in the thick of the North Fork tourist traffic, but needed the commercial kitchen in Riverhead to produce most of what they sell.

Over the years, Amaral has made a name for himself deploying local wines, beers, coffee, fruit and even salt in his bonbons. When he started the business he was importing chocolate from Belgium but then he heard from the universe again. “It told me that in five years I would start to make chocolate from beans.”

Again, he obeyed. And here’s where North Fork Chocolate really turned into something unique on Long Island. Unlike chocolatiers that start with big blocks of chocolate that they melt and manipulate, Amaral starts with cacao beans, which are found inside big, football-shaped pods that hang from cacao trees.

He puts the roasted beans and sugar into a machine that consists of a powerful motor and a 3-gallon stainless-steel cylinder that spins for anywhere from 24 to 48 hours, grinding and churning the mixture until it is perfectly smooth. That’s the chocolate that enrobes his clementine-caramel “Darlings,” his raw-honey-filled “Fleurs-de-lis,” and Italian-cherry “Baci.” That’s the chocolate that is mixed with cream to form a ganache that might be infused with espresso or raspberries. That’s the chocolate that he forms into bars that might be goosed with sea salt or caramel or local merlot.

But even chocolate can’t entirely satisfy Amaral's need to feed. The Riverhead shop has a menu of savory items, all vegetarian (most of which can be made vegan as well). Cheese from Mecox Dairy in Bridgehampton is paired with his own snappy crackers; avocado toast is made with his own sourdough; flatbreads are homemade; greens are local and seasonal specials now include local asparagus crostata and “soup gone wild” with wild mushrooms, wild rice and roast vegetables. If for any reason you don’t want to gorge on chocolates for dessert, you might have his buttermilk-carrot cake, hazelnut-Nutella dacquoise or Granny Smith caramel-apple pie, among other individual pastries.

North Fork Chocolate Company, 309 E. Main St., Riverhead and 8700 Main Rd., Mattituck, 631-779-2963, northforkchocolate.com