I’m very open minded about hot chocolate. It is perfectly fine plain but also happily paired with other flavours. Sometimes these pairings are amazing, sometimes they are interesting but not to my liking and sometimes I wish I could ask for my money back. Today was one of those days. The 6th hot chocolate we had on our crazy two day tour of the Vancouver’s Hot Chocolate Festival, where we tasted a total of 21, was from Grenville Markets on Grenville Island. I absolutely loved Granville Island. In addition to being home to Kasama, a very talented bean to bar chocolate maker, there is even a shop selling locally made sake. The tea shop in the market has incredible teas. There are stationary stores, bookstores, local delicacies; everything is here.

 In the centre of the market is a stall selling pies called a la mode. They sell not just sweet pies but every kind of pie you can imagine. Their signature however is their pot pie with several different savour fillings. On a normal day, I’d recommend following this up with a piece of pecan pie but today we chose to try their hot chocolate.  I honestly would have loved to be in the room when they brainstormed what they were going to do with this drink. I would have told them to stop. Ok. Get ready for this. It’s a dark hot chocolate with marinara sauce, rimmed with rich thick melted white chocolate and topped with basil and Cheetos. It was literally the worst thing I have ever tasted, ever. It was savoury but also unbelievably sweet like a sugar syrup. Needless to say, don’t buy it. Just wait for someone dumb enough to buy (um, like me) and take a picture of theirs if you want to share this atrocity with your Instagram followers.  So pies, absolutely yes, hot chocolate, absolutely no.

A la Mode: 1689 Johnston St #575, Vancouver, BC V6H 3S2, Canada Open daily 9am-6pm alamodepie.com