#31 PRESTAT LTD

The best thing about writing this blog is that I get to learn about British history and culture while also trying really standout British products. They can’t all get four-star reviews, but this week I’m forced to give out just that. Prestat Ltd holds a royal warrant from Her Majesty the Queen as “Purveyors of Chocolates.”

Prestat proclaims itself the inventor of the chocolate truffle, which was enough to make me first stop and take pause. The business was started by a French immigrant to Britain named Antoine Dufour—unofficially in the 1890s and officially in GB in 1902. That its current owners do not know the complete company story and have been working tirelessly to archive its past is definitely some of Prestat’s charm. You can read so much more about that search right here. One of my favorite little tidbits is that Charlie and the Chocolate Factory author Roald Dahl was a big Prestat fan. He even centered one of his more macabre novels for grown-ups, My Uncle Oswald, around the chocolates. Here’s a little excerpt:

“I opened a drawer and produced a box of chocolate truffles. Each was identical. Each was the size of a small marble. They were supplied to me by Prestat, the great chocolateers of Oxford Street, London. I took one of them and made a hole in it with a pin. I enlarged the hole a bit. I then used the head of the same pin to measure out one dose of Blister Beetle powder. I tipped this into the hole. I measured a second dose and tipped that in also…”

Prestat today makes chocolate truffles that are quite a lot bigger than a small marble, hot chocolate, chocolate bars, and wafer thins. We sampled the London gin truffles and thought they were amazing. Picture a white chocolate/lemon/gin exterior with a bit of a fizzy aftertaste (achieved by using popping candy as an ingredient) encasing a creamy milk chocolate center. 

We also tried four of the miniature chocolate bars: a milk chocolate, dark chocolate (70% cacao), dark chocolate raspberry, and milk chocolate with roasted almonds and sea salt.

These chocolates stand out not only for their taste but for the bold and brash designs of the packaging and website content. In the early 2000s, artist Kitty Arden—who is famous for her distinctive dressing gowns, pet coffins, and paintings—designed this packaging in primary and secondary colors and prints to rebrand and revive Prestat—to turn it into a show-stealer.

Not so long ago, a young woman named Diana Spencer did that for the British royal family. My copy of Vanity Fair came in the mail just the other day, and there was Diana’s famous 1997 photograph by Mario Testino on the cover. I knew that, even though I’ve avoided it for quite awhile, it was time to start writing about Diana. Diana the show-stealer. In the 1980s she took the focus off of Queen Elizabeth, Prince Philip, and Prince Charles and kept it on herself for the better part of two decades. It explains, in part, why Americans know so much about Diana, so little about the royal family she married into.

Biographers of Prince Charles mostly argue the same thing about the prince’s relationship with Diana: he had slept around Britain for all of his 20s and still had no long-term relationship to show for it; he was starting to feel like the British public and his parents expected him to get married; he was in love with Camilla Parker Bowles (who was married, who was not viewed as an appropriate mate by his parents); when he met Diana it seemed like the right thing to marry her and be done with it.

It’s not so romantic, that. Settling. It’s also somewhat hard to believe. Diana was beautiful and well-spoken and fun. She took the royal family by storm in good ways and bad, and she took the British press by storm too. They adored her. They made her the most photographed woman in all of the world. That Diana’s husband was married to her but pining for someone else for years is something most people found difficult to believe when the news first came out.

Maybe that’s why Vanity Fair can still feel confident putting a long-dead princess on its cover, why the British press can still compare Kate as a mother with Diana as a mother and know people will remember what they’re talking about. She was a show-stealer.

Among the royal warrant holders, Prestat is a show-stealer too.

Where to buy: My Prestat chocolates were hand-delivered by my in-laws, fresh off a trip to London. You can find them in the U.S. at Chelsea Market Baskets in New York City; they will also ship them to you in cool weather.