Level 1, Shop 135 Chatswood Chase 345 Victoria Avenue CHATSWOOD SYDNEY NSW 2067
Phone 94116962
Review originally posted on the 17th of February 2003
The name Max Brenner sounds like it belongs to the wheel man in a 1940s gangster movie. It’s actually the name of a chocolate shop found in a shopping mall at Chatswood. Mr. Brenner is also known as the bald man and he understands Theobroma cacao to be the compensation for love. The place wasn’t booming when I entered on Saturday morning, so I can’t say just how much chocolate ‘the man’ would sell here. But whoever sells the chocolate to ‘the man’ really knows how to sell chocolate. There are boxes, bags, sacks and blocks; together with beans, powders, brownies, and two giant sealed centrifugal chocolate machines churning molten white and dark chocolate.
An attempt to go slightly freestyle and move away from the retail therapy scheme was clearly made with Chatswood Chase. The deviation never really fooled me. No matter how much the glam is pushed it’s a shopping mall, pure and simple. Thus making it tainted and difficult. It’s similar to version number two of some crappy movie with the big bell of marketing. Great if you consider a tee shirt bearing the slogan “Nasty Models Inc” to be edgy, but otherwise worthy of a detour. But I wander into the Chase occasionally. The place is lousy with beautiful women.
The chocolate brown theme extends to the Brenner décor. One can perch at the bar, or alternatively, on a set of nursery sized tables and chairs, all as backless as a Bond bimbo’s dress. And there’s dark wood everywhere, too. Rough-hewn chunks of the stuff. Climbing the wall with the shelving, and hanging curiously from the ceiling.
My order was ferried to me on a wooden placemat whereupon a tea light heated a small ceramic crucible holding milk. A spoon that is also a straw accompanied a side dish of chocolate pieces. It’s your basic fondue arrangement. My choice of Peruvian dark was gorgeously rich and so perfectly itself. The Mayans really had a moment when they discovered chocolate 3500 years ago. And I felt the omnipotence growing as I ladled chunks of “the dark” into the brew. At $5:50 it’s a great substitute for love, and possibly what the whole retail thing is all about. The blessedly quiet atmosphere was a bonus. The last thing I need is some hyperglycemic brat peaking on sugar and cocoa. That’s what the rest of the mall is there for.
Publishing the unpublishable while growing up and finding complacency
- Jimmy Olsen
- Sydney, Australia
- So far, much of the content here started life as a rather embarrassing personal journal, but it's now something I can begin to be proud of. In a warped way, both my sites are the growing inbred children of the now defunct parental site: www.butterboxmedia.com and characteristically (if not genetically) remain under construction. So for that I will apologize, but I won't ever say sorry for my inability to deal with the everyday, the trashy, the crappy, the dismissive, mass stupidity, the bland and the empty. Below are a few reviews from long ago that I exhumed from www.landofsurfandbeer.com.au, a site where I once occasionally posted under the screen name of hed. I have not changed the content of the reviews, however I have corrected my naff punctuation, incorrect spelling and frequent inability to use grammar correctly. Who knows? Perhaps one day this too will be corrected. In the meantime, the best hope you have at getting me to post anything about anything is by virtue of either being really terrible or really wonderful. Roll the dice.
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