5 stores · curated ORBIS register
Dublin
Cocoa Atelier is a Dublin chocolate house producing handmade filled chocolates, truffles and coated nuts in its city-centre atelier. The range runs from dark, milk and white chocolate drops to fruit truffles and marshmallows.
Best for Handmade filled chocolates and truffles
City centre, Dublin
House of Read, at No 4 Parliament Street in Dublin and dating to around 1712 when James Read became an apprentice cutler before the firm won a royal warrant for cutlery and surgical instruments in 1821, today sells chocolates, macaroons, pastries, jams, marmalades and chutneys. It also stocks china, silverware, candles and both new and vintage silver-plate tableware bearing its elephant-and-castle design, in a building restored in 2017.
Best for Chocolates preserves and silver tableware
Dublin
The Proper Chocolate Company makes bean-to-bar chocolate in small batches in Dublin. Patrick and Kelli Marjolet founded the business in 2016 after experimenting with cocoa beans while living in San Francisco. The makers select and roast the beans to bring out their individual flavours before turning them into chocolate.
Best for Dublin-made bean-to-bar chocolate in small batches
The Proper Chocolate Company makes bean-to-bar chocolate in micro-batches in Dublin, and the phrase is meant literally. Every step happens in their own facilities. The beans are hand-sorted before roasting. They are cracked and winnowed on site. Refining and conching happen there too, and the chocolate is aged before being tempered and moulded on the premises.
Very little chocolate sold anywhere is made this way, and the difference is not marketing.
Patrick and Kelli Marjolet founded the business in May 2016, but it started three years earlier in San Francisco. Patrick was given a bag of cocoa beans by a local small-batch maker and decided to try making his own chocolate. The obsession that followed has not let up since.
The sourcing argument is the one worth hearing. They compare it to winemaking: seek out the beans you want, then roast them to bring out their own flavours rather than to a house standard. Treated properly, cocoa releases a range of savours and subtleties that do not survive mass production.
Kenmare Place, Killarney, County Kerry, Ireland
Lir Cafe hand-shapes chocolates — including Baileys truffles and Guinness caramels — from its Kenmare Place shop in central Killarney. The counter doubles as an espresso bar, open daily from 7am to 6pm.
Best for Hand-shaped chocolates in Irish flavors — Baileys truffles, Guinness caramels — poured alongside espresso
On Kenmare Place in the centre of Killarney, Lir Cafe runs its chocolate counter and coffee bar as one operation rather than two separate businesses. Every piece is hand-shaped rather than moulded from a single cast, which the shop states means "no two are alike" — a detail that shows in the texture of its truffles and caramels rather than in any marketing claim alone. The lineup leans into Irish flavor references: Baileys Truffles and Guinness-flavored caramels sit among the standard truffle and caramel cases, tying the shop's confectionery directly to the county it's in rather than a generic import. Coffee runs alongside the chocolate rather than as an afterthought — Lir positions itself as a stop for coffee drinkers as much as for anyone buying a box of sweets, open seven days a week from 7am to 6pm. For a town built on tourist footfall through Killarney National Park, that combination of an early opening time and a dessert counter that also pulls espresso gives Lir a dual identity: a place locals can get a working coffee before opening hours turn touristy, and a place visitors can pick up a distinctly Irish box of chocolates rather than a generic souvenir tin.
Shop Street
A family food hall on Shop Street since 1925, McCambridge's stocks Irish farmhouse cheeses, chocolates, wines and deli provisions downstairs with a restaurant above. Four generations have run the shop, now known for its own-label preserves and hampers.
Best for Irish food and wine
McCambridge's of Galway is a family food hall at 38-39 Shop Street, next door to Lynch's Castle, trading since 1925. George McCambridge came to Galway in 1922 from James McGlade and Co., a Belfast wine and spirit merchant, to manage Powell's at the Four Corners on Shop Street. On 3 July 1925 he and Francis Brennan opened McCambridge, Brennan and Co. as what the family describes as a high class grocery and provision house with a wine and spirit trade and a bar at the present address. Brennan left in the 1930s and the shop became McCambridge's Ltd. George's son Pat joined in 1950, and George bought the premises outright in 1955. A 1972 renovation brought Galway its first off-licence. Pat's son Eoin joined in 1985 and his daughter Natalie returned in 2002 to run the wine and spirits side. The kitchen gained a hot food counter and outdoor seating in 2010, and in June 2012 the restaurant Upstairs at McCambridge's opened above the shop. Downstairs the food hall holds a full grocery range and a sandwich bar. A self-serve salad bar sits beside an olive bar and a deli counter of cold meats and Irish and international cheeses. The wine shop leans to continental bottles and the whiskey shelf ranges across Irish and Scotch. Hampers and own-label gifts ship from the website. The Irish Farmers Journal profiled Natalie McCambridge, general manager, in 2018.
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