Whatever Happened To Anthony Bourdain's Good & Evil Chocolate Bars?

Anthony Bourdain lived his life with a sense of adventure and wonder that was inspiring, moving, and sometimes heartbreaking. His writing and his TV shows went so much deeper than simple recipes or kitchen demonstrations. He was passionate about food, and that passion was evident in the chocolate bar he created with his good friend Eric Ripert, called Good & Evil. Unfortunately, when Bourdain died in 2018, the company behind the chocolate bars chose to cease production in honor of the chef.

Christopher Curtin, owner of Éclat Chocolate and maker of Bourdain's Good & Evil bars, felt that ending the sale of the bars was the respectful choice. The chocolate bars have not come back on the market since.

Bourdain introduced the bars in 2012 when they made waves for coming with a steep price tag of $18 attached. Even today, that's a hefty amount to pay for a simple chocolate bar. But this wasn't really a simple chocolate bar, either. This reflected Bourdain's love of food, people, and the world we all share. Many details of Bourdain's involvement with the chocolate and the village where it was produced remained unknown until after the celebrity chef and author's death.

Anthony Bourdain was curious about chocolate and visited a village in Peru for his show "Parts Unknown." This town, whose exact location remains secret, is high in the Peruvian mountains. The people there and the product they made struck a chord with Bourdain, who decided he wanted to create a chocolate bar using ingredients sourced from this small village.

While visiting, he helped improve the kitchen facilities for locals who were living in dangerous conditions, cooking on wood stoves with poor ventilation. Bourdain and his partners paid to replace the appliances so they could run on rice husks, which cost nothing compared to the expensive wood used before. They also improved ventilation to promote health and safety. He did all of this anonymously, and the story only became known after his death. He just wanted to improve the lives of people he'd met and grown to respect without any fanfare.

The chocolate used in Good & Evil bars was handpicked and made from a strain called Peruvian Pure Nacional, also known as Fortunato No.4. Not only was it a rare cocoa, it was also thought to have been extinct for a century. The end result, a bar produced on vintage Swiss machinery under the skilled hand of chocolatier Curtin, was described by a writer from TIME as "the best chocolate I ever ate." Even though Bourdain's death put an end to the Good & Evil bar, the people he worked with in Peru are still providing chocolate to producers today, in part thanks to the chef's efforts.