Anybody can buy a bar. Book the room it was made in.
Which Brussels workshop lets you temper your own, what the Lindt ticket really costs, where a pod gets split open in front of you. Reviews of the chocolate tours, tastings and factory visits you can book worldwide.
Four chocolate days, four completely different afternoons.
A museum ticket, an apron, a tasting walk and a wine-country run. What each one costs and what the people who booked it came back saying.
01The cheap way inChoco-Story Brussels: Chocolate Museum Entrance with TastingMuseum entry in Brussels with a tasting at the end. The room smells of it long before you reach the counter.
02Hands in itBelgian Chocolate Making Workshop with TastingsTemper, mould and fill your own pralines in a Brussels kitchen, then carry the box out with you.
03The tasting walkAward-Winning Geneva Chocolate &Old Town Tour with Boat Ride (3h)Geneva old town chocolatier by chocolatier, with a boat back across the lake at the end of it.
04Wine, then cocoaAmazing Yarra Valley Wine Tour + Chocolate, Farm Fresh, GinYarra Valley cellar doors in the morning and a chocolaterie after lunch, back in Melbourne by evening.
Six countries that take chocolate seriously enough to show you the back room.
Belgian praline kitchens, Swiss factory floors, Paris counters worth queueing at, cacao ground on a stone metate in Oaxaca, plantations in the Caribbean, and Australian cellar doors that end at a chocolaterie.
Belgium sells you the box. The good days get you behind the counter.
Brussels, Bruges and Ghent run the same three kinds of chocolate day. Here is what each costs to join and which city suits it.
A tasting is the cheapest way to find out what you actually like.
Single-origin bars laid out dark to light, hot chocolate thick enough to stand a spoon in, cheese or coffee or beer poured alongside. These three carry more travellers than anything else on the site.
The chocolate experiences travellers book before anything else.
Every chocolate tour we have reviewed →The ones that fill up first, and what earns each of them the slot.
1
Lindt Home of Chocolate Museum Entry Ticket
At Lindt Home of Chocolate in Zurich, you follow cocoa from bean to bar with a multilingual audio guide, multimedia displays, factory views, and tasting stations. The visit takes place beside the Lindt and Sprüngli factory and includes unlimited chocolate samples, a huge shop, lockers, and wheelchair access. Allow about one to two hours.
From · $22
Read our review →
2
Choco-Story Brussels: Chocolate Museum Entrance with Tasting
from $18
3
City Tour, Cruise, and Lindt Home of Chocolate Visit
from $103
4
The Chocolatarium Chocolate Tour Experience in Edinburgh
from $44
5
Award-Winning Geneva Chocolate &Old Town Tour with Boat Ride (3h)
from $131
6
Yarra Valley Wine, Gin, Whisky and Chocolate Tour
from $93
7
Chocolate Museum Entrance Ticket
from $19
8
Hungry Mary’s Famous Beer and Chocolate Tour in Brussels
from $119
You will be slower than the chocolatier and the box still comes home.
An apron, a cold marble slab and somebody patient. Most classes end with a box you filled yourself; the good ones explain why it snaps instead of bending.
Every chocolate workshop →
Half of this site starts at a tree, not a shop.
A pod opened with one stroke of a machete, wet beans sweating under banana leaves, a stone grinder and a cup that tastes nothing like the bar you know. Grenada, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Ghana, St Lucia, Ecuador.
What a day of chocolate actually sets you back.
Everything on the site grouped by price. A museum ticket and a three-hour workshop are nowhere near the same purchase.
Museum entry, a single tasting, the short factory tours and most walking routes.
Hands-on workshops, guided tasting walks and the majority of plantation days.
Private classes, wine-country runs and the full-day origin tours with lunch.
Three rooms you cannot get into any other way.
Cheese counters and wine cellars turn up on every food trip. A fermentation box, a conching machine and a cold tempering slab do not.
The fermentation box
Raw cacao tastes of almost nothing you would recognise. The flavour arrives in the week after harvest, inside a wooden box under banana leaves, while the wet pulp heats up and sours and the beans change chemistry in the dark. Farm tours in Grenada, Honduras and the Dominican Republic lift the lid for you, and the smell that comes off it is closer to cider than to chocolate.
- 1Maui Ku’ia Estate Guided Cacao Farm Tour and Tasting★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 1,103 reviews
- 2Award Winning Farm Tour: Coffee, Chocolate and Unique Gifts★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 484 reviews
- 3Boti Falls, Umbrella Rock, Aburi Gardens & Cocoa Farm Tour★★★★★★★★★★ 4.6 · 72 reviews
The conching machine
Rodolphe Lindt left a mixer running over a weekend in 1879 and invented the texture the rest of the world now takes for granted. Conching is still hours of grinding that turns gritty paste into something that melts at body heat. The Swiss factory visits are built around that room, and most of them end at a fountain you are allowed to stand under.
- 1Lindt Home of Chocolate Museum Entry Ticket★★★★★★★★★★ 4.7 · 9,329 reviews
- 2City Tour, Cruise, and Lindt Home of Chocolate Visit★★★★★★★★★★ 4.5 · 4,624 reviews
- 3Zurich Sights: Cruise, Lindt Chocolate and optional FIFA Ticket★★★★★★★★★★ 4.0 · 1,028 reviews
The tempering slab
Chocolate that cools badly goes grey, crumbles and tastes waxy. Tempering fixes the crystal structure by working it thin across cold marble until it snaps clean off the spatula. It is the one skill a workshop can genuinely teach you in an afternoon, and the one nobody manages at home on the first try.
- 1Chocolate Workshop in Chocolate Museum w/ Tasting★★★★★★★★★★ 4.5 · 1,802 reviews
- 2Belgian Chocolate Making Workshop with Tastings★★★★★★★★★★ 4.7 · 1,629 reviews
- 3Belgian Chocolate Workshop in Bruges★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 660 reviews
Four chocolate bookings that close before your flight does.
Most tastings can be arranged the evening before. These run on timed entry, benches that seat ten, and harvest calendars with no interest in your flight.
- 01Lindt Home of Chocolate Museum Entry TicketEntry is by timed slot. In summer the Zurich slots go days ahead and there is no queue to join without one.
- 02Belgian Chocolate Making Workshop with TastingsA tempering bench seats eight or ten. Weekend classes in Brussels and Bruges are the first to close.
- 03Choco-Story Brussels: Chocolate Museum Entrance with TastingThe live demonstrations run to a timetable rather than on arrival, so the ticket time decides what you see.
- 04Maui Ku’ia Estate Guided Cacao Farm Tour and TastingSmall estates take one group a day, and the pods only get split when there are pods.
Five things a chocolate booking page will not tell you.
Whether the tasting is included or paid at the counter. Whether a child is allowed near the tempering bench. Whether the box comes home or gets eaten on the spot. Whether nuts and dairy are avoidable, which on a shared production line they usually are not. And whether the factory is actually running, because a lot of them stand still at the weekend.
Brussels, Bruges, Paris, Zurich, Turin: the chocolate route almost everybody does first.
Bruges
YorkChocolate reviews, newest first.
Everything else we just added →
Bordeaux: Chocolate and Pastry Food Tasting Tour
Read our review →
Bogotá: Candelaria Tour with Cacao and Coffee Workshop
Read our review →
Big Island Hawaii: Craft Chocolate Tasting and Farm Tour
Read our review →
Gruyères Cheese and Cailler Chocolate Tasting Tour
Read our review →
Chocolatier for a day: raw bean to bar chocolate in Modica
Read our review →
Barossa: Enjoy Wine, Lunch, Brewery, Chocolate & Wildlife
Read our review →
Farmer’s Market, Cheese, Chocolate & Pastry Tour
Read our review →
Casa Batlló, La Pedrera, & Chocolate Tasting Tour
Read our review →
Ancestral Cocoa Tasting in Ronda – Tree to Cup Experience
Read our review →
Alicante: Guadalest Castle and Chocolate Factory
Read our review →
Almaty: City Highlights Walking Tour with Chocolate Shop
Read our review →