There’s a chocolate apothecary bar in Culver City with chocolate body oil

If you’ve spent any time at ChocoVivo, Patricia Tsai’s Culver City chocolate shop, you’ll likely have eaten your fair share of chocolate. Tsai’s stone-ground chocolate, which she sources from a farm in Tabasco, Mexico, comes in bars, which you can get whole or as part of a tasting menu. You can also get your chocolate in liquid form, as hot chocolate or sipping chocolate, in growlers (yes, growlers) or as part of her new “mylk” chocolate flights, which have hazelnut milk rather than dairy and coconut sugar or honey in place of traditional sugars.

For Valentine’s Day, Tsai is now making chocolate-rose oil as part of her new chocolate apothecary bar, which focuses on the medicinal aspect of chocolate. (Some of us, of course, would say that all chocolate is medicinal.) This is “not recommended as a substitution for daily chocolate — that’s what the chocolate bars are for,” Tsai said the other day.

Tsai’s chocolate-rose oil contains a blend of cacao butter, Bulgarian rose oil, sea buckthorn oil, sesame seed oil, and jojoba and coconut oils, and is good for both skin and hair. Yes, it is edible, technically, but that’s not the point.

Tsai says she’s expanding her apothecary component soon, to include chocolate masks and scrubs. And if you’re worried that you’ll be tempted to eat the stuff, maybe pick up some bars or a jar of chocolate butter — or a few of the tamales (not chocolate) that ChocoVivo carries Wednesdays through Sundays.

12467 Washington Blvd., Culver City, (310) 845-6259, chocovivo.com.

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