HotelChocolat.co.uk

Good service nice food friendly staff recommend you to come and enjoy delicious chocolate and clean atmosphere

The chocolate from this company has always been very good, although the last couple of boxes I've had I haven't been as impressed with - hard to tell if the quality has been going down recently or if I'm becoming more of a snob with these things.

Anyway I thought I'd review it has i placed an order online recently to collect in store, and the service was pretty bad. The website worked well so can't fault that, but when I went to the store to collect the order the staff had a lot of trouble with it, going to the store room several times and asking me for my name and the order number and then what exactly I did order a couple of times when they couldn't find it.

In the end they had to create the order again from goods in the store, as they gave up on finding the actual order that should have been prepared. It's the week before Christmas so I can understand they're busy, but I don't think that's really an excuse as they should be prepared for it, especially a slightly higher-end chocolate shop like this.

I'll still give them 4 stars overall though, but might move it down to a 3 if the quality of the chocolates really is going downhill.

I first started to purchase chocolate from here way back in about 2002, I went mad buying from them. My fave were Carribean white chocolate gin truffles and the Calvados milk chocolate ones. But then I found over the years the quality seemed less, the choice less varied, so I took to buying from another shop where you can choose what you get. In the Hotel chocolat boxes there seems to be too many chocolates that are just "meh" in flavour, some too strong, some just there for the sake of them being "different".
The boxes are classy, they scream expensive but are sadly in my opinion lacking what they used to have.
So if you want to impress buy from them, but if it is for your own taste I recommend another store.