Dr Oetker opens Toronto pop-up chocolate pizzeria in time for Valentine's Day
Baking products company Dr Oetker is going chocolate to the max with its new restaurant, just in time for Valentine's Day. At Cioccolato’s (named after the company’s frozen chocolate pizza) the oven, the cutlery, the walls, even the artwork are all made from chocolate.
Cioccolato's Ristorante opened as an all chocolate-themed restaurant in Toronto
To launch Cioccolato’s, Dr. Oetker opened the pop-up pizzeria made entirely of chocolate in Toronto’s Queen West neighborhood.
“It’s wall-to-wall chocolate,” says Mark Scott, creative director at John St. in Toronto, the agency behind the chocolateria. “Chocolate pizza is a very unique and indulgent idea, so we wanted to launch it in an equally unique and indulgent way.”
The pop-up opened on February 9 (National Pizza Day) and will stay open through Valentine’s Day with guests getting a tour of the restaurant and free slices of Cioccolato.
To tease the opening, Dr. Oetker introduced the #chocolatedreams hashtag on social media and asked Canadians what their chocolate dreams were. The company then made some of them a reality.
“We made chocolate flowers and chocolate chandeliers,” says Scott. “One guy asked for a chocolate shark. We couldn’t do that, but we did make a chocolate shark painting.” The team worked with renowned local artist Adrian Forrow, who used chocolate as paint to create six original works of art. Naturally, the art is framed in chocolate.
Another person requested a chocolate diamond. John St. worked with Heart In Diamond, which specializes in human-made diamonds, to create another one-of-a-kind – the world’s first chocolate pizza diamond, displayed inside of the pizzeria. “It’s weird, but it’s real,” says Scott. “We even got a diamond certificate of authenticity because we figured people would be asking.”
Heart In Diamond took a Cioccolato chocolate pizza that had been broken down into powder form and placed it in a high-pressure, high-temperature oven – which is capable of achieving temperatures higher than 2,000 degrees Celsius and a pressure of 60,000 atmospheres – for 120 days to create the .54 carat diamond.
Dr. Oetker’s new chocolate dessert pizza features a chocolate crust topped with chocolate sauce, dark chocolate chips, milk chocolate shavings and white chocolate chunks. John St. worked with Toronto experiential agency Launch to pull the project together, while media agency Initiative promoted the limited-time event.
