Sweet News

Xocolatti to Open Next Week, Bringing Freeze-Dried-Pomegranate Clusters to Soho

Xocolatti's creative confections.
Xocolatti’s creative confections. Photo: Michael Allin/New York Magazine

Bombay-born Shaineal Shah was always expected to go into finance or join the family jewelry business. Instead, just out of Babson College, he colonized part of his parents’ Scarsdale kitchen and started transforming Valrhona chocolate into sake truffles, barklike mango-paprika “slates,” and freeze-dried-pomegranate clusters, and selling them online and at retailers like the Chocolate Library and Food Emporium. He’s since moved production to a Port Chester factory, and next week he opens his first Xocolatti shop, where he’s stocked all three walls floor to ceiling with truffle assortments. It’s no wonder that Shah packages his “crumbles” of white and dark chocolate, dried pineapple, and coconut in jumbo test tubes; he considers his profession “like being a mad scientist.”

Xocolatti, 172 Prince St., nr. Thompson St.; 212-256-0332

Xocolatti to Open Next Week, Bringing Freeze-Dried-Pomegranate Clusters to Soho