Last Thursday, the world-famous Belgian chocolate maker Godiva opened its first official cafe in the city. The Godiva Cafe, located at East 50th Street and Lexington Avenue, aims to offer not only its renowned chocolate truffles and coffee, but quickly prepared breakfast and lunch meals to meet the needs of New Yorkers who are constantly on the go.
While this brand-new breakfast and lunch menu offers different items such as salads and delicious chocolate-drizzled waffles, nothing is more exciting than the concoction Godiva has unleashed onto the world known as the “Croiffle.” This sinfully good meal is exactly what it sounds like. To prepare, a croissant is opened ever so slightly and stuffed with either a savory option of three cheese or cheese and bacon, or a sweet option with the chocolatier’s signature chocolate. Then, the whole thing is put into a waffle press to matt the whole croissant-waffle sandwich down into perfection.
The Croiffle is something that you can’t really know how much you’ve needed all of your life until you’ve tried it. Once you have, it may haunt your dreams. It’s that good. The buttery flavor remains intact, with all of the messy flakiness of a normal croissant gone within the crystallized caverns forged from the waffle iron.
The new cafe took over from the old retail location that had been in that area for years and is adopting a menu tested in a pop-up that was located in the heart of Penn Station. That menu had been created by executive chef and chocolatier Thierry Muret, who has been working with Godiva for 30 years.
Muret believes that by branching out away from only selling retail and providing customers with hot and fresh Belgian-style cooking, it will not only help to show this type of cuisine to a brand-new American audience but also help Godiva innovate and create new dishes like the Croiffle to bring the tradition into the future.
“I would see people order the Croiffle in Penn Station and begin to walk with it,” says Muret. “Then they would take a bite and stop, and you could see the look on their faces as if they were saying, ‘What the hell happened to me?’ That is what I am hoping for!”
Make sure to abandon all of your plans and run to the new Godiva Cafe at 560 Lexington Ave. to try a Croiffle as soon as possible.
