For the love of chocolate

“What you see before you, my friend, is the result of a lifetime of chocolate.”

The quote on the t-shirt hanging in BLU Boy Chocolate Café and Cakery sums up its owner, David Fletcher, in his steel-rimmed glasses, in his white chef’s shirt, with his white cup of coffee.

The heavy-set, Eminem-blonde chocolatier is perched in the corner of the cafe, with only a few precise spots of chocolate dotting his shirt. He has his back to the picture window overlooking the Walnut-Kirkwood intersection, instead facing the chocolate-lined shelves and catchphrase t-shirts featuring quotes like the one above.

Fletcher started the tiny bakery, a space of muted reds, yellows and browns in 2007 with his husband, Scott Jackman, and has become sort of a local celebrity.

His “office,” as he calls it, occupies one of the four two-person tables squeezed into the café. It’s the Thursday before the Week of Chocolate, three days before Art of Chocolate, where he will once again showcase the talents he developed in New York and honed in Munich.

The other customers in the café have left, the young, quiet couple against one wall and the two loud women against the other, but the door opens frequently, and an employee shyly interrupts occasionally to ask Fletcher questions. His replies are quiet, patient.
His soft voice is hard to hear over the occasional crash of the coffee machine.

Valentine’s Day is only a couple weeks away, but you wouldn’t know it from the cafe, even though chocolate is one of the holiday’s most famous associations. Fletcher is unapologetic.

“I struggle with the whole retail thing. I should already have hearts everywhere,” he says, waving his hands at the undecorated walls. He really likes Valentine’s Day because he gets to change the cafes fare. “My nature is to change things. I like to change without apologizing.”

It all seems so fluid, but the culinary direction wasn’t an easy one for Fletcher to take. Chocolate was always present in his life, though it wasn’t his focus. It was there during his childhood in Mannheim, Germany, where his mother’s family lives and where he was introduced to the culture of afternoon dessert. It was there in high school, where he first started to realize his love for the culinary. It was there in the first couple years as a music major at the University of Iowa, while he played cello. It was there in medical school and during his 15 years as a physician. And it was there the night in the kitchen when he suddenly concluded that he needed a change.

“I was tinkering with a recipe and I remember thinking, ‘I wonder if I can learn more about this…I’m going to try this,’” Fletcher recalls.

After his revelation, Fletcher started flying to New York on weekends for a nine-month “pastry camp” at the Institute of Culinary Education in 2002, while continuing to practice at the Student Health Center during the week. In 2005, he and his husband took a class in Munich, where he learned specialty confectionary techniques, like to blow sugar the way a glass worker blows glass. And in 2007, the couple opened the café.

“You may stray, but you will always return to your dark master, the cocoa bean,” another t-shirt reads.

Fletcher stands in front of a spinning wheel of chocolate. It’s 9 a.m., Jan. 30, and he’s already working with a 150-pound tub of liquid chocolate. The tempering machine with which he works is aptly named: performing an exact process of heating the chocolate, cooling it, then heating it again. The procedure insures the candies’ smooth, shiny texture and the clean snap when a piece is broken.

He works quickly, filling up little heart-shaped molds under the wheel’s fountain and scraping away the excess. They’ll eventually become perfect little pictures of brandied cherry and passion fruit for the Art of Chocolate patrons the next night, but there’s still a lot of detail work to do.

Fletcher’s 20 years of medical education and practice, something he refers to as a “distraction”, means he’s well-acquainted with precision. But if you ask him, chocolate is a lot harder than medicine.

“In medical school they teach you everything you have to know,” he says. “In culinary school you don’t learn what to do when the chickens aren’t laying. Thank God I love it.”

A lot rests on those chickens, which roost in Heartland Family Farms in Bedford. Fletcher and company use up 25 dozen eggs in a week, along with 50 pounds of flour and 70 pounds of butter. The cocoa count is higher: they make 5,000 pounds of their own chocolate each year and order over 3,000 pounds of other suppliers’ chocolate.

The culinary art is about as nebulous as Fletcher says his homework in New York was. Perfecting techniques is one thing. Constantly coming up with new recipes and presentations is another. Fletcher’s ideas sprung from department store window displays to the lady behind him in the grocery line who forgot the celery.

“I’d think, ‘Ok celery. Maybe not a taste that everyone would like but how can I incorporate that crunchiness?’” he says.

In the midst of stacks of chocolate-stained molds, trays of rainbow-frosted cupcakes and the heavy aroma of French Roast coffee beans, Fletcher’s sous-chef Stacy Strand and fellow employee Janae Allabastro work around him. It’s one hour til opening, and the three chitchat as they ready the cafe. Talk skips around from the status of the cinnamon rolls to the time of the PRIDE Film Festival shows that day at the Buskirk-Chumley Theater, with which BLU Boy shares a door.

Fletcher has had maybe three unhappy customers total. The worst complaint is that the coffee is a little cold. He’s never had a bridezilla. In short, chocolate makes people happy. 

Most of Fletcher’s customers don’t know anything about him. They don’t know he’s legally married to his husband, even though Indiana doesn’t recognize the union. They don’t know that his 45th birthday is Monday and that he hasn’t decided if he’s going in to work or not. Or that he loves bloody, gory movies, though you won’t find any splatter pattern inspiration in his chocolates.

They don’t know he finds inspiration in the crunchiness of celery and squid ink, which he’s had a bottle of for eight years. (It’s not good anymore, and no, he hasn’t figured out a way to use it.)

Still, the people are by far Fletcher’s favorite part of the business. His place in the back room of the café is a mere three steps from the front counter. He may be out of sight, but he’s far from out of earshot.

“My best experiences are sitting back there and listening to all the relationships out here,” he says, noting a “world-renowned” professor who comes in every Saturday to share a chocolate chip cookie with his daughter. For the duration of that cookie, Fletcher says, the professor gives his daughter his absolute undivided attention.
“It’s not like solving world peace, but for 20 minutes it’s really cool,” he says.

Even the cafe's name has a deeper meaning. BLU stands for Boys Like Us, meaning boys like Fletcher and his husband, who completely rerouted their lives long after they’d settled into a niche. Plus chocolate’s just sexy.

“There’s an inherent sensual quality of chocolate,” Fletcher says, cupping his hands as if about to dip them in a liquid chocolate pool. “When you melt down a 10-pound pot and start working with it…that’s pretty luscious.”

He fills another mold, but this time he flips it over, letting the chocolate pour out in thin streams. He’ll let the chocolate coating the surface set before he fills them, seals them and pops them out to arrange meticulously on a tray, the way Allabastro is doing now.

She fills the rotatable glass display case with fresh chocolates, carefully shifting individual pieces a little this way, a little that way.

Almost ready.
 
“Without chocolate there would be darkness and chaos,” reads the last t-shirt on display at BLU Boy.

It’s 6 o’clock Sunday night and the cafe is empty. It’s the only day of the week BLU Boy is closed, but tonight Fletcher and the staff don’t get the night off. They’re a few blocks away at the IU Art Museum, giving out samples of their Valentine’s Day chocolates to the Art of Chocolate patrons.

The setting sun glows warm on the walls of the high, glass-ceilinged foyer of the museum as jazz tunes from the Andy Cobine Trio float upward from the first landing. The older crowd wears slacks and loafers, while the younger crowd wears jeans and boots.

Fletcher is set up right in front of the Arts of Asia and the Western World, standing quietly to one side while Allabastro and baker Dominique Webberhunt point out the different chocolates to the steady surge of people. He’s traded the white chef’s shirt for an outfit of all black and every now and then he greets people, engaging in light hugs and small-circle conversation.

The crowd moves around the tables in a long, slow stream. They stop to contemplate every table, wine glasses in hand.

Downstairs, a grumpy old man near the entrance gripes to his wife.

“All the chocolate stuff tastes pretty much the same,” he complains. “It’s just chocolate.”

Asked for a response, Fletcher smiles slightly and looks away. After a moment of thinking he shakes his head.

“I don’t have a clever response. It is just chocolate.”