Gerard Mendis Chocolatier: More than just chocolates!

By Cassandra Mascarenhas

Gerard Mendis, over the decades, has established himself as culinary connoisseur and is a name synonymous with exquisite handmade chocolates, made with the finest ingredients. It is the knowledge of his skill and mastery of flavours that has made Colombo’s gastronomes flock to his first eatery in Colombo, located at Horton Place.

It’s a chocoholic’s dream as you step in – rows upon rows of beautifully created chocolates in a wild variety of flavours and scrumptious cakes. The hardest part is narrowing down your choices as you just want to sample them all!

However, don’t be misled by the name Gerard Mendis Chocolatier – the chef has incorporated his many years of experience at some of the world’s best hotels to provide patrons with much more than just chocolates and cake. A chocolaterie, patisserie, boulangerie and restaurant all in one, Gerard Mendis Chocolatier also offers a range of delicious dishes handpicked and created from scratch by the chef himself.

Comfort food

The eatery’s plush interior would give anyone the assumption that it dishes out high-end cuisine but instead upon opening the menu, you find firm traditional favourites such as nasi goreng, jumbo hotdogs, battered cuttlefish, chicken and beef served with roast paan and Sri Lankan style kalu pol curry right next to New Zealand lamp rack and Cajun spiced spring chicken – quite the eclectic selection.

“A lot of people walk in here thinking it’s a fine dining restaurant but that’s precisely what I wanted to get out of,” explained Mendis, the current Chairman of the Chefs’ Guild and former Executive Pâtissier Chef at the Hilton Colombo. “I’m not trying to brand this as an upmarket eatery. I serve comfort food, all of which is made from my own recipes.”

Apart from managing his eatery in Colombo, Mendis is also a partner in a venture operating a chocolate factory and a number of high-end boutiques in Bangalore and other Indian cities and has plans to launch similar ventures in Singapore, Dubai and Melbourne in the future.

At the moment though, his main focus is on his newest venture in Colombo, a concept he worked on for over a year and has so far handled every aspect of it by himself, from designing the eatery’s striking logo to building the furniture in-house.  

“It’s a multi-cuisine menu – there is something for everyone and it is affordable. I love Sri Lankan food and would love to serve more but I’m just not geared to do so. I plan on introducing kottu to the menu very soon though,” he added.

Plans for expansion

Kottu is not the only addition he plans on making in the near future. In addition to changing the menu every six months, Mendis also has plans of including a pre-dinner lounge, an ice cream cafe, a designer range of cakes and expanding the current menu. Interestingly, he also intends to introduce an array of eggless products, which is something that he is currently working on. The New York cheesecake now available at the eatery is part of this eggless range and has proved to be one of the fastest moving items.

There are now almost 300 varieties of cake to choose from and at least 15 of these are available to buy over the counter, in addition to 35 varieties of homemade chocolates which he hopes to increase to 80 varieties in time.

“They are all handmade and have a shelf life of only four to five days. We start making fresh batches of chocolates only when we are down to our last couple in the store. The same applies to cakes which have a shelf life of three days,” he said.

Corporate functions and special events

The eatery also caters to special events such as birthdays, anniversaries and corporate functions and is fully-geared to do so with the first and second floors of the eatery set aside exclusively for such functions. The first floor can hold 80 to 100 guests and the inclusion of a dance floor and menus customised to the customer’s needs makes it an ideal location. The second floor can hold up to 20 people and is perfect for smaller, private get-togethers. The pre-dinner lounge on the ground floor can also be reserved for private dinners.

State-of-the-art machinery and an excellent team of chefs gives Gerard Mendis Chocolatier the capacity to produce large volumes and is therefore the perfect place to go to for boxes of chocolates, fresh breads and scrumptious cakes, all of which are customised and carefully crafted by Gerard Mendis and his team to suit the customer’s specifications. They are even equipped to incorporate a client’s design or logo and have no restrictions on a

minimum order.

“We specialise in ‘shape’ cakes and ‘drawing’ cakes. We take pride in the fact that every single bit of our cakes are edible, no matter how difficult the structure is. For example, if we make you a Ferrari cake, every single bit from the tyres to the windshields will be edible. Similarly, even the vases in our Mother’s Day range were edible,” Mendis explained.