An employee in crinkled plastic gloves chops strawberries behind the counter of the dessert shop. A chocolate aroma floats past the open door of the shop to pedestrians milling about on the sidewalk outside.
The shop’s owner, Thomas Einwechter, bustles inside with his arms full of plastic Kroger grocery bags. He sets the haul — cartons of strawberries, a cluster of bananas — onto the counter.
La Dulce Chocolate is perched at the corner of Kirkwood Avenue and South Indiana Avenue and opened Aug. 22 at the former Mr. Tokyo location. Its best-selling item is a Dubai chocolate strawberry cup — a combination of chocolate, pistachio cream and toasted shredded dough called kataifi.
Einwechter got the idea to open a sweet shop that sold Dubai chocolate after a TikTok of a girl trying the dessert went viral, garnering 137 million views.
“I had seen Dubai chocolate and various other versions of this throughout Europe and Asia,” Einwechter said. “And it had always blown my mind that America had not yet caught up.”
Einwechter is originally from Hershey, Pennsylvania, where The Hershey Company was founded. He said he was influenced by the Milton Hershey School, a free private school paid for by a trust established by the Hershey family, and the enterprise of selling chocolate as a way to contribute to the greater good.
He joined the army to pay for college, majored in comprehensive business and stayed in the ROTC program at Pennsylvania Western University, Edinboro. He was later commissioned as a field artillery officer and has served in the army for 11 years. He moved to Bloomington after being stationed at Camp Atterbury, an hour away.
Einwechter recruited his brother, Jacob, to be a full-time manager of the sweet shop since he’s still an active-duty officer.
Beyond Einwechter’s duties in the army, the brothers hopped several hurdles to create the shop. He originally wanted to name it La Dulce Dubai but found that companies with “Dubai” in their names legally had to sell products from Dubai.
It was also difficult for him to buy the storefront from Mr. Tokyo. When he was looking at the space in July, it was originally quoted for $95,000. He was eventually able to snag the spot for $50,000 after some negotiation. Equipment purchases and health inspection snags postponed the shop’s opening, however, and Einwechter ended up spending far more than he originally intended.
“I took 40 grand out of my retirement account,” he said. “I really put it all out there, you know, to get this up and going, so, you know if I didn’t start cash flowing very soon, I was going to go bankrupt before I even opened.”
It took three inspections for the shop to be cleared by the health department. Einwechter said other business owners told him they might’ve been giving him a hard time because he was a new business owner. When the store finally passed, Einwechter opened La Dulce Chocolate the same day. The opening was a soft launch, he said, since the menu wasn’t completely ready. It has since been finalized and includes chocolate bars, crepes, cheesecakes, waffles and more. Despite the struggles it took to get the store open, Einwechter said traffic and demand have been consistent.
One of the shop’s more eccentric — and popular — items are Dubai chocolate Labubus, which are $7. He bought molds resembling the small collectible toys to make Labubu-shaped chocolates filled with pistachio cream and kataifi.
When customers first see them, Einwechter said, their first reaction is to giggle or laugh.
“It’s super popular,” Einwechter said. “We prioritize actually making the Labubus over making the regular Dubai chocolate bars.”
He got the idea from a viral video posted in June where a woman proudly shows off a gold version of the monster-like wearable toy.
“I’m sure it’s a fad. It’ll probably die out in a few months,” Einwechter said. “And then I will have wasted that money on those molds, but not really, because they made a lot of money in the interim.”
While the trendiness of Labubus may fizzle out, Einwechter said he thought the demand for Dubai chocolate would stick around, and he’s on board with entertaining any new Generation Z or Alpha trends. He also said he wanted to introduce new menu items in the future, such as savory crepes, and wanted to see La Dulce Chocolate’s identity develop into more of a creperie.
One of his goals is to introduce better decor by late fall. Currently, the shop has several marbled tables and chairs, but he intends to upscale the atmosphere by introducing silverware, sit-down seating and a waited table service. Einwechter’s target market, he said, are the younger generations who are on social media, aware of current trends and can find the shop easily online. He pointed out the successes of other Indiana dessert shops that sell Dubai chocolate-flavored items.
“Those financials have been doing amazing, and they all propped up out of nowhere,” he said. “They manifested out of nowhere because that girl went viral on TikTok.”
