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The city's own Willie Wonka, Jacques Torres, has opened a cavernous chocolate factory that blurs the lines between retail and manufacturing. Designer Pierre Court indulged every one of Torres's fantastical notions, from the cacao-pod shape of the shop to a statue of Quetzlcoatl, the Aztec cacao god, at the entrance. The central structure weaving through the high-ceilinged space is an abstraction of the conveyor in Torres's favorite episode of I Love Lucy. There's even a lounge of sorts (it is in Soho, after all). But for Torres, the Haven's focal point is on the other side of the glass—the factory floor, where beans are fumigated, sorted, roasted, cleaned, cooled, shelled, pre-ground, mixed, refined, and conched—the lengthy process in which cocoa and sugar are heated and ground to superhuman levels of smoothness. — Rob Patronite and Robin Raisfeld

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