Mark Lieuw never could have predicted he’d be spending his days turning sugar and cacao into edible works of art. Back in 2012, he was preparing to take the medical school admission test after studying biology, math, and chemistry in college. Then his mother suggested he give pastry school a try.
“It was just something I did as a kid,” Lieuw says. “I would bake, I would make crème brûlée. But it was never something I considered as a career.”
As is often the case, his mom was right: Liew enrolled at Le Cordon Bleu and immediately fell in love with the process of pastry-making. After graduating, he gained a foothold in the world of fine dining, landing jobs at Eleven Madison Park in New York City and Atelier Crenn and Saison in San Francisco. Now, he’s striking out on his own with a chocolate pop-up, Stay Sweet (opens in new tab), which regularly sells out of photo-worthy confections infused with flavors like shiitake mushroom caramel and Japanese brown rice.
Lieuw is one of a new wave of San Francisco chocolatiers with serious fine-dining credentials and distinctive culinary perspectives. These new-school chocolate makers represent the latest chapter in a 170-plus-year legacy that includes titans like Ghirardelli (opens in new tab) and Guittard (opens in new tab), as well as more modern makers like Dandelion (opens in new tab), Tcho (opens in new tab), Recchiuti (opens in new tab), and pandemic-popup turned brick-and-mortar chocolate shop Topogato (opens in new tab).
“There’s such a history of chocolate in the city, whether you talk about Ghirardelli or Dandelion,” Lieuw says.
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Indeed, San Francisco is already a pretty crowded marketplace for chocolate. But for Shekoh Moossavi, who moved her 6-year-old company Shekoh Confections (opens in new tab), from Palo Alto to San Francisco in February, the chocolate scene has room for new points of view. “The way you make chocolate has everything to do with the person who makes it,” she says. “We bring our personalities, our interests, into our chocolate. It makes it the same but different.”
Moossavi, similar to Lieuw, started off in the world of science, working in glaucoma research. But she found herself craving change, and at her sister’s recommendation, decided to go to culinary school.
“I loved the creative side of it, that there were no boundaries,” she says.
If Dandelion and Tcho are dedicated to the flavor nuances of cacao, not unlike a winemaker’s approach to grape varietals, then this current wave of chocolatiers is all about showcasing the individual maker’s personality.
Moossavi, who was born in Iran and worked as a chef at the Ritz-Carlton, ran multiple restaurants in the South Bay before completing a program at the Ecole de Grand Chocolat Valrhona (opens in new tab) in France. Now she imbues her not-too-sweet sweets with Persian flavors like sour orange and rose, and sources those ingredients from growers in Humboldt and Sonoma.
Lieuw, who officially launched Stay Sweet out of his parents’ garage in late 2024, similarly features farmers market-sourced ingredients and nods to his Cantonese heritage. He cites Sunday dim sum feasts with his family, followed by lengthy cooking sessions with his grandmother, as core to his identity as a chef. “I want this to be such an authentically Bay Area, San Francisco product that it can’t be replicated anywhere else,” he says.
Part and parcel with the San Francisco-ness of these businesses are the challenges of, well, running a business in San Francisco, including high startup costs and notoriously byzantine permitting processes. Add to this a steep increase in the price of cocoa (opens in new tab), which peaked in late 2024 due to weather and pest issues in West Africa, and you have a difficult set of conditions for a chocolate entrepreneur. “I chose to start a chocolate business when chocolate pricing is the highest it’s ever been!” Lieuw says, laughing.
But being in San Francisco also comes with benefits, including a sophisticated consumer base with an openness to higher-priced, premium products — and a real interest in food. Todd Masonis, the CEO of Dandelion Chocolate, recalls how quickly his company’s customers went from relative novices to well-versed in the language of chocolate.
“Our first year, people would come into our Valencia Street cafe for a hot chocolate and would be asking all kinds of questions. By year two, they were bringing their friends in and answering the questions for them,” he says.
Dandelion, which now has two pop-up locations (one on Union Street and one in Union Square) in addition to the original Valencia Street location, a Ferry Building shop, and a production facility in the Mission, is proof that there will always be a demand for chocolate. When forced to shut down its stores in 2020 due to the pandemic, the company pivoted to online sales and hugely expanded its national business; now, the bulk of sales are online, a direct reversal of the cafe-dependent model from 2019.
Still, demand for chocolate does not make the finicky and time-intensive production of it any easier. Michael Tabatabai, formerly the executive pastry chef of Tartine Bakery, honed his chocolate-making skills at Masa in New York and the now-closed Postrio in Union Square. He launched his Moon Kids (opens in new tab) pop-up in May out of Schlock’s Bagels, but has already scaled back to focus on events.
“I need to know my limitations, and being the sole production person, and doing packaging and delivery… it led me to take a step back,” he said. Still, he’s hopeful for the scene — and his place in it. “I don’t know how I fit into the chocolate landscape. I just know that I’m a part of it, and I’m happy to be here.”
Moossavi also had a challenging first few months. Her Third Street space required major improvements to meet health code requirements, plus extensive cleaning and the construction of a glass-walled studio for chocolate production. She struggled at first to maintain her customer base after leaving Palo Alto’s University Avenue. But for her, a presence in the city is worth the risk.
“San Francisco, with all of the problems that it has, inspires me,” she says. “I get to work early, and I’m facing the east and the Bay. I have my tea, and I watch the sun rise, and I start making my chocolates. I love this place.”