"COOKING is one of life's chocolate is one of life's pleasures." Right on the money, this line from the writer Sara Perry is just one of the assortment of pithy chocoholic lines etched on the walls of Ruth McGarry Quinn's beautiful Torc Patisseric et Chocolat. And, as you linger in this lovely, lean room, with a crisp espresso and a slice of Chocolate Decadence, Ms Perry's line seems unusually apt. One of life's pleasures, indeed.
There are no better, sweeter drugs known to man or woman than chocolate and coffee, and I don't know anyone who understands this better than Ruth McGarry Quinn. Her Torc truffles are well known throughout the country - from a standing start only three years ago, Torc now has 150 outlets - and the opening of Torc Patisserie et Chocolat completes the circle.
A shop and cafe with a French name, in Ballymahon Street, Longford, selling sublime treats such as Austrian Coffee Gateau ("A rich coffee cake, soaked in a brandy syrup, topped with fresh cream and shavings of rich chocolate") and cracking cappuccinos with the sort of minimalist cool you might have reckoned was the sole preserve of Temple Bar . . . it's far from this they were reared in Longford.
Maybe it is, but the goodburghers have taken to Torc like ducks to water.
Torc is a demonstration of the modern zeitgeist in Irish food, its standards are international, and not provincial. You could drop it smack into the middle of a street in Paris or Vienna, and it would come out with colours flying. As McGarry Quinn says: "We don't make things just to make them. They have to be right."
Such panache is evident in every aspect of Torc, from the svelte green and white decoration of the chocolate boxes to the panache of their lovely Easter bunnies and cracking Easter eggs, from the moreish bagels with cream cheese and salmon, to the smart aprons of the staff and their adroit service.
Such professionalism really glad dens the heart. But nothing glad dens the heart more than gladdening the stomach, and it is in her understanding of the narcotic element of chocolate, cakes and coffee that McGarry Quinn is inspirational. As another of the inscriptions on the wall of Torc announces, "Chocolate makes otherwise normal people melt into strange states of ecstasy,"and Torc is likely to become a shrine for those of us who crave that joyous fix of chocolate and coffee.