YUMMY … STOP IT MAX, THIS IS ALREADY TOO MUCH. That wait means there’s plenty of time to study the room, done up in the usual cocoa-themed color palette of browns, caramel, orange, and cream, and to read the suggestive writing on the walls: VERY MUCH CHOCOLATE. Service, by the way, is friendly and well meaning, although the wait for food can be long. The fact that the liquor license hasn’t arrived hasn’t hurt business one bit most evenings, there’s a bottleneck at the hostess stand. Like ChikaLicious and Room 4 Dessert, Max Brenner strives to be a dessert destination, and the minuscule café tables tend to be taken by groups of diet-be-damned girlfriends yapping away like overstimulated mynah birds, gurgling tots, and sheepish young couples on dates. Trouble is, Brenner’s self-proclaimed “new worldwide chocolate culture” comes off as just the sort of tourist-targeting spectacle you’d expect to find in Times Square, animated with loud Euro-accented house music and an abundance of overwrought, often overly sweet concoctions. Somewhere over the course of spreading the chocolate gospel, the European-trained (and sufficiently bald) chocolatier Oded Brenner has adopted the Wonka-like persona of “Max Brenner.” These days, he can generally be found at his newest location, expediting orders, munching chocolate-covered toast, and ensuring that the venture continues to position itself as the joyful antithesis of the intimidating realm that, his press materials assert, haute chocolate inhabits. The name is actually a composite of two Israeli marketing geniuses, Max Fichtman and Oded Brenner, who launched the business ten years ago in Ra’anana and sold it to Strauss-Elite (Israel’s version of Kraft), which now operates outposts and franchises from Melbourne to Makati City. Cheese, there is no living, breathing Max Brenner-well, not really. Just as there is no Johnny Rocket and, sadly, no Chuck E. For the chocolate-obsessed New Yorker, intimately familiar with the single-origin oeuvre of everyone from Jacques Torres to La Maison du Chocolat’s Robert Linxe, one question is even more pressing than whether to sample the chocolate bagel or the chocolate pizza: Who is this Max Brenner, and how come I’ve never heard of him? With its vats of swirling molten chocolate, its ceiling pipes painted to resemble Oompa-Loompa–esque cocoa conduits, and the goofy chocolate-centric slogans scribbled everywhere, it’s hard to separate the place from the superslick marketing plan. Few legal substances exert as strong a pull as chocolate, which might explain the slightly dazed and practically drooling crowds streaming in and out of Max Brenner: Chocolate by the Bald Man, the glitzy new Union Square emporium that’s part retail sweetshop, part café, and all slickly packaged cocoa-scented theme park.
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