Gold, Grit, and Ganache: San Francisco’s Chocolate Story

San Francisco was built on three things: gold, grit, and chocolate ganache.

On this walking tour, you’ll go far beyond the tech city to discover the port transformed by the American artisan chocolate revolution. I’ll take you beyond the chocolate wrappers to find out how Gold Rush prospectors, Swiss immigrants, and modern bean-to-bar pioneers built a chocolate capital from the ashes of earthquakes and buried ships.

The tour begins at the iconic Ferry Building, an 1898 landmark that stood defiant against the Great Earthquake. As you walk up historic Market Street, you’ll stop at celebrated chocolatiers like Recchiuti and Dandelion, where I’ll share the techniques I use as a chocolatier to taste chocolate like an expert. Along the way, we’ll cross “The Slot” – the old class divide of the city – and walk directly over the hulls of a Gold Rush fleet buried beneath your feet.

You’ll explore the evolution of Maiden Lane from a notorious brothel row to a hub of luxury retail, and hear about the ingenious chocolate-making techniques behind Domenico Ghirardelli’s “prospector fuel.” The tour ends at See’s Candies, where you’ll hear the real story behind Mary See – the 71-year-old woman whose home recipes launched a chocolate empire that still tastes exactly as it did in 1921.

On this 90-minute tour, you’ll have a chance to:

• Learn the professional “Melt” technique at Dandelion Chocolate, to reveal hidden flavor notes in every bean
• Discover how the 1906 earthquake literally melted entire factories, fusing machinery and cacao into the city’s history
• Walk over the skeletons of abandoned Gold Rush ships that still rest beneath the Financial District’s steel and concrete
• Visit Lotta’s Fountain, where opera stars performed for thousands and families searched for the missing after the great fire
• Peek inside San Francisco’s only Frank Lloyd Wright building, a spiral ramp prototype for New York’s Guggenheim Museum
• Hear how Ghirardelli’s innovation turned chocolate into a durable survival ration for miners in the gold fields
• Explore the original shoreline of Yerba Buena Cove to see what the city looked like before it was built on landfill
• Sample the world’s first Champagne Truffle at Teuscher, crafted with Dom Pérignon and traditional Swiss mastery

Bring your walking shoes and your sweet tooth. By the end of this tour, you’ll never look at a truffle the same way again! You’ll also see how this city and its sweets grew up together through fire, fortune, and reinvention.