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Summer Sweets: J. Noto's Small Sweets Pack Big Flavor

This summer, we're sneaking out of sit down restaurants and into the sweet shops of St. Charles for a little sugary indulgence.

Main Street in St. Charles is home to a plethora of small, family owned speciality shops. Walk down the cobblestone street and you can find English imports, hand made soaps, and best of all, artisan chocolates.

J. Noto is a tiny storefront with just enough room for a L-shaped pastry case and three small tables. Brightly colored sugar cookies catch your eye the moment you walk in. Towards the back, massive cakes lure you in deeper. Between the light confections and the dense desserts is the best part of the store - the chocolate case.

A lot of people have two core experiences with fancy chocolates - Russell Stovers and Godiva. One comes from Walgreens, the other from the mall. Both of them have a way of showing up on Valentine’s Day and during apologies.

J. Noto’s chocolates aren’t designed for grand statements.  They’re a tiny, everyday indulgence. Located next to so many good restaurants, they’re the sort of thing you casually pick up after dinner instead of getting an anonymous factory made dessert.

Don’t get me wrong. I like a box of Godiva chocolates as much as the next girl, but most of their truffles are the size of golf balls. In order to hold in the more liquid contents, the exteriors have a slightly brittle edge more likely to shatter under your teeth than gently submit to several small, gentle bites. You’re stuck either cramming this oversized thing in your mouth all at once or licking pieces of it off your hand for the rest of the afternoon.

The first thing I noticed about J. Noto’s chocolates was that they were sized like the sweets I enjoyed in France. Each one delivered two bites, three if you nibbled carefully. All artisan chocolate shops sell their candy by the pound, so smaller chocolates mean an opportunity to try more flavors.

If you have children, smaller chocolates also mean a little less fuel for a sugar rush.

I’m always a little amazed at how satisfied I am by a really high quality piece of chocolate. Sure, they say it satisfies, but if I eat an entire Snicker’s bar I’m suddenly jittery while still hungry. The high fructose corn syrup doesn’t flip the switch in my brain from craving to contentment. Staring at those rows upon rows of chocolates lined up behind glass, I coveted a bite of every single one. In reality, I sampled a nibble from four different chocolates and couldn’t make myself eat anymore. These were filling, crave curing candies.

The dark chocolate orange creme held just the right balance between tartness and creaminess, the sweetness of the filling playing nicely against the hint of bitter in its dark shell. Unlike a Godiva chocolate, the exterior of the truffle gave gently under my teeth. I knew I could cut these in half and share them without the candy falling to pieces.

I indulged in nibbles of the Black Forest, Amaretto, and Hazelnut before I switched over to the cookies.

In baking, there’s a reassuring grittiness that comes from using real sugar instead of high fructose corn syrup. Anyone who loves home made cookie batter is familiar with the smoothness of butter impregnated with a gritty essence of sweetness. J. Noto’s thumbprint cookies have the same spoon-licking addictive texture, only baked into a flat surface. They look like they should crumble into pieces at the smallest touch, but what is no doubt an artery clogging quantity of butter keeps the little white spheres in perfect shape. Thankfully, the cookies are on the same petite scale as the chocolates.

The milder chocolate dipped shells mostly existed to show off the rich flavor of J. Noto’s chocolates with a different texture background than a truffle. The chocolate chip cookies were nice, but somehow not as addictive as the thumbprints.

I assumed that eight chocolates and eight cookies would eat up an entire pound of candy. They certainly looked daunting neatly packed in a box. Instead, the total came to only $12. I actually asked the cashier to double check. She laughed and said she got that a lot. $18 per pound goes a lot further than you think when the chocolate are small and the cookies are light.

Next time you’re on Main Street, wander into J. Noto and spend $1 on dessert. I promise a single, high quality chocolate will be immensely more satisfying than any slice of industrially made generic cheesecake, no matter how immense. It’s better on the tongue, has fewer calories, and leaves you feeling a lot more indulged.

For quality, presentation, flavor and price, I rate this sweet shop an immensely satisfying A.

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