Robert Steinberg started new age of U.S. chocolate

Published 5:00 am Sunday, September 28, 2008

Robert Steinberg, a physician who helped revolutionize America’s appreciation of fine chocolate after launching a San Francisco Bay Area company that produces some of the best chocolate in the country, has died. He was 61.

Steinberg, who had lymphatic cancer, died Sept. 17 at the University of California, San Francisco Medical Center near his home in San Francisco, announced officials at Scharffen Berger Chocolate Maker, which he co-founded in 1996.

With a former patient, Steinberg started a small chocolate manufacturing company that emphasized Old World artisanal standards and “completely transformed American understanding of chocolate,” said Alice Medrich, a cookbook author known for her chocolate expertise.

“He changed chocolate from being seen as a mere sweet candy to having the status of a complex and interesting food. A new age of chocolate was started in this country with that company,” Medrich told the Los Angeles Times.

By emphasizing premium ingredients and bringing artisan standards to what had been a largely industrialized process in the U.S., Scharffen Berger helped move gourmet chocolate from a special-occasion purchase to an everyday indulgence. Devotees likened it to drinking an espresso instead of truck-stop java.

Before he was a chocolate perfectionist, Steinberg practiced medicine in Ukiah, Calif. After being diagnosed in 1989 with terminal cancer — and given a 50 percent chance of dying within 10 years — he soon sold his practice.

“The apparent nearness of death,” he later said, gave him permission to try just about everything. He took piano and drawing lessons. He cooked more, and traveled to Italy and France.

At the suggestion of a friend, Steinberg read a 600-page textbook on the science of chocolate making. It opened the door to “an underground world,” Steinberg wrote in “The Essence of Chocolate,” a 2006 cookbook-memoir.

“It was like pulling the disguise off of something,” Steinberg said in 2005 in the Express of Emeryville, Calif. “Here’s chocolate, this thing that we all think we know, but you look under the surface and it’s something different.”

After a 1993 tour of the noted Bernachon chocolate company in Lyons, France, Steinberg composed a letter in the most polite French he could muster and asked for an internship. They granted him two weeks.

Upon returning home, he ran into John Scharffenberger, a former neighbor and patient who was selling his winery — Scharffenberger Cellars — and looking for a new business opportunity. Steinberg offered a sample of French chocolate.

“Robert had this chunk of chocolate in his pocket that I think he’d been carrying for months,” Scharffenberger told People magazine in 1998. “But it tasted better than anything I’d ever had.”

Steinberg had his partner for the business and the test kitchen. Using a coffee grinder, mortar and pestle — and a hair dryer to help the chocolate remain viscous — they worked with nearly 30 varieties of cacao beans in Steinberg’s kitchen.

By 1997, they were making chocolate with a collection of vintage German machines in a small San Francisco factory. Julia Child reportedly proclaimed Scharffen Berger the best chocolate she had tasted in the U.S.