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It has all the charm of a cozy neighborhood café with warm wood decor, glass cases of enticing offerings, a humming espresso machine, and an artistically crafted chalkboard menu on the wall.
But this shop has a twist on the classic main street eatery concept. Here, chocolate is king.
Ana Bandeira Chocolates Café and Bakery, located at 48 Main St. in the busy downtown section of Northampton, Massachusetts, offers customers a true farm-to-table chocolate experience, crafting its confections, pastries and even some of its entrée offerings using cacao harvested at its fourth-generation family farm in Espírito Santo, Brazil.
The international enterprise — with chocolates crafted both in Brazil and Northampton — opened on the site of the former Patisserie Lenox in 2022.
“We’re coming up on our fourth year in May,” co-owner Dave Haughey said, adding that when the “for sale” sign went up on the main street location back in 2022, Ana Bandeira Chocolates was just getting off the ground, and the location seemed a perfect launching spot for the chocolate-and-café concept.
Today, Ana Bandeira Chocolates Café & Bakery entices with cases of hand-crafted-on-the-premises bonbons and chocolate bark, chocolate bars handcrafted in Brazil, and a daily assortment of delectable chocolate desserts and pastries.
“We produce 35 to 40 pounds of chocolate here a week, and that’s only a fraction of what we use; it’s just to fill in the gaps,” Haughey said of the amount of raw chocolate and cacao nibs the modest café turns into pastries and confections on a daily basis.
The majority of the base chocolate is hand-crafted in Brazil at a facility and cafe operated by Haughey’s brother-in-law and partner, Alexandre Pontual. Both the finished chocolate and cocoa nibs are then exported to Northampton for use in their products.
The Northampton café also serves six breakfast offerings, including eggs Benedict and omelets, eight sandwiches, including the chocolate-inspired chicken mole torta, three salads, including a cacau-mango bowl including candid cocoa nibs, a daily assortment of café-made soups, and a Brazilian beef-and-bean stew called feijoada. Both breakfast and lunch offerings are served until 3 p.m. daily.
The extensive drink menu includes coffee drinks such as café au lait, Brazilian Cappuccino, espresso, affogato – ice cream with a shot of espresso, hot tea and of course, café-crafted hot chocolate among its 10 offerings. All the coffee used in the café’s drinks is also imported from Brazil, Haughey added.
Haughey said the café bakes all its cookies and cakes on the premises, as well as most of its sandwich breads — including the popular Brazilian Pão de Queijo, a gluten-free cheese bread made from tapioca flour.
“It’s as ubiquitous as a grilled cheese in Brazil, you can buy them in a gas station,” Haughey said of the popular, savory pastry. Their Pastel de Natz, a Brazilian laminated pastry filled with egg custard, is another popular baked offering, he added.
From tree to bar
But the dream of turning the fruits of his wife, Mariana’s, fourth-generation cacao farm into premium chocolate started long before Haughey ever turned the key in the front door of Ana Bandeira Chocolates.
“I think it’s because of my wife’s love of chocolate,” Haughey shared. “She was the first person in her family who said, ‘Let’s make chocolate out of our cacao’.”
But Haughey said it was 15 years from the time she broached her idea to the first time he and Mariana tried to craft the confection.
Pontual, he said, did make an attempt to turn the cacao pods into chocolate in Brazil about 10 years ago by putting some roasted nibs and sugar into a blender, but the end product wasn’t really what you would consider chocolate.
The turning point in his chocolate story was when, a few years later, Haughey said he found a small, affordable melanger and gave it to his wife as an anniversary present.
A melanger, Haughey explained, is a stone grinder that is required to process the roasted cacao nibs down to a powder so fine that there is no graininess and it develops a silky texture.
Armed with the melanger, Haughey said he and his wife started making their own chocolate at home. He also took a small melanger down to his brother-in-law in Brazil, who also started experimenting with chocolate-making. By 2020, Pontual was also making chocolate bars in Brazil, he said.
Haughey, who is a musician by trade, said he started taking some of the chocolate bars with him on tour around 2017, offering them for sale alongside merch post-performance. Those chocolate bars, he said, sold pretty well.
When COVID-19 shut the music business down, Haughey said he turned his efforts toward refining the family’s chocolate recipes.
“I’ve always cooked. I’ve always been a creative person. With COVID, I didn’t have as much work, so my outlet became chocolate,” Haughey shared.
He discovered an online resource called Bean to Bar, which offered instruction, advice, and a source of equipment to take the family chocolate-making to the next level.
As the world opened, Haughey said he and Pontual began seeing advice of other chocolate makers, visiting a chocolatier in Belgium as well as consulting with other chocolate makers, such as Nestlé and Lindt, for insights into the art of chocolate.
“With my brother-in-law, the company grew pretty quickly in the past five years,” Haughey said. “It went from making chocolate in my mother-in-law’s house, and we had one employee. In the third year, we went from three employees to 30 employees and opened both cafés here and in Brazil.”
The company name, Haughey said, is a recognition of the chocolate’s connection to his wife’s Brazilian family roots. Bandeira, he explained, is the nickname of his wife’s grandfather. Ana is his wife’s grandmother’s first name.
Today, all the bar chocolate sold by Ana Bandeira in its two cafés — Northampton and Brazil — and on the company website, anabandeirachocolates.com, is made in Brazil using locally sourced ingredients. The other products — bark and bonbons — are made in each location using cocoa from the family cacao farm.
“We take care of the entire production of the chocolate,” Haughey said. “We plant the trees, harvest the cacao, we make the chocolate out of the cacao, and we export the chocolate and cocoa nibs from Brazil.”
It’s a family business, and a multi-national company all in one, he said.
“We have all the problems of an international company and a small business,” Haughey explained.
For Valentine’s Day — and beyond
With the busy holiday gifting season behind them, Haughey said Ana Bandeira was gearing up for the spring holidays, including Valentine’s Day, Easter and Mother’s Day.
For Valentine’s Day, he said the café would be molding a large hollow chocolate heart filled with bonbons. The bakery will also be crafting a heart-shaped cake sized to be shared by two people.
“Valentine’s Day this year is a Saturday, it’s going to be especially busy,” Haughey said of the chocolate counter and the café in general. He’s expecting a good crowd to come in for dessert at lunch and dinnertime.
For Easter, the plan is to craft a giant cacao-shaped pod out of chocolate and again fill it with bonbons or other café-crafted chocolates.
“In Brazil, it’s common to have large chocolate eggs hanging from the ceiling of supermarkets at Easter,” Haughey said, adding that Lindt and Nestlé are among the chocolate makers that produce this holiday treat. The cacao pod is his iteration of this tradition for 2025.
“It will be the first year doing this here,” Haughey added.
For Mother’s Day, he said it’s the bonbons customers come in for. That, and they order from his specialty cake menu for the day.
Again, he expects the café to be busy with people coming in for brunch that day.
A café — and so much more
Haughey credits his many hardworking employees, especially his manager, Rene St. Amand, for the continued success of the café and credits his staff for many of the menu ideas over the past four years. He is also grateful for the loyalty of employee Ash Bara, who has been with the café since the day it opened.
Ana Bandeira Chocolates Café and Bakery is open seven days a week. Hours are Monday 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., Tuesday to Saturday 8 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. and Sunday 9 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. Many evenings, the café also offers music from 5-8:30 p.m., with a schedule of entertainers available on the website anabandeirachocolates.com.
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