Monsieur Chocolat

After serving as Ritz Carlton's corporate pastry chef, he jumped at the chance in 1989 to be pastry chef at Le Cirque and later Le Cirque 2000. For 11 years, Torres dazzled the restaurant world with his daring and imaginative desserts, winning the industry's top awards. But along with considerable prestige came considerable pressure. Increasingly, he would wake up exhausted and sore, not from the work itself but from the stress. "Aye-aye-aye! I decide I just cannot take it anymore," he says.

He preferred the pressure of starting his own chocolate factory, a longtime dream. Friends tried to discourage him, in particular from going it alone. But he insisted on financing Jacques Torres Chocolate himself, using his and Kruid's retirement savings. "He didn't want outside investors controlling his name," Kruid says.

Initially, Torres intended to focus on supplying restaurants and hotels with fresh gourmet chocolates. The store was his landlord's idea, a way to attract traffic to a neighborhood of abandoned, graffiti-covered warehouses. The Web site, www.mrchocolate.com, was a hunch. The fact that all three segments of the business thrived still surprises him. Within a couple of months, he recouped his investment. The company has grown from a bare-bones, three-person startup to a profitable enterprise with 18 employees.

With hundreds of wholesale customers, some of whom are notorious for last-minute orders, Torres has mastered high-speed production without sacrificing his high standards or trademark artistry. Open a box of Jacques Torres chocolates and before you marvel at how they taste, you marvel at how they look. Exquisite. As though each ornate piece was crafted by hand.

It wasn't.

Torres has a knack for adapting the manufacturing process to fit his recipes. For instance, he insists on making chocolate without using chemicals. No artificial sweeteners, no preservatives. That means solving the bubble problem. When ingredients are mixed, air gets blended in, which leads to oxidation and a very impractical product--chocolate with a short shelf life. Instead of adding antioxidants, Torres cranks up a powerful vacuum mixer that's normally used to blend cosmetics. It eliminates bubbles in a process that not only extends the life of the candy, he says, but also enhances the flavors, making them more concentrated.

The vacuum mixer is not his only piece of cosmetics machinery. Another computerized apparatus that was designed to fill makeup bottles squirts chocolate, then liquid filling, into a mold--a particularly tricky procedure. That's his secret weapon for creating caramel truffles with liquid centers. The $250,000 machine is the most expensive equipment he owns, but it's worth it. It makes truffles at light speed and with far more precision than the old way: by hand.

The key is knowing what to speed up and what not to. Cooling a ganache, for example, simply can't be rushed. The flattened filling cools overnight before getting cut into squares for coating. "If you want to make money, you cool it faster, so it takes two hours, start to finish," he says. "But the filling is more dry and sweeter."

People don't come to Jacques Torres Chocolate solely for the chocolate. They come to see Jacques Torres in action. And he doesn't disappoint. He's at the factory most days, his jacket smudged with chocolate. He wanders in and out of the store, serving hot chocolate and autographing his cookbooks ("Eat dessert first," he signs). "You like cappuccino? Try this. Everybody tastes here. It's a chocolate factory!" he gushes. It's fine that people come to the store to see him, but they're supposed to leave with chocolate. Chocolate pretzels, perhaps, or martini truffles.

Within days of experimenting, Torres adds those two new products to the store. He's pleased, but as usual, the customers have the final say. "If something doesn't move, that's the last time you see it," he says.

By early December, it's looking awfully good for the pretzels and martinis. They're moving. And moving fast.

Chuck Salter (csalter@fastcompany.com) is a senior writer at Fast Company.