She Knows the Customer by Their Footsteps: Preslava Velkova of If you chocolate

The first diamond If you chocolate ever made has rachel inside it. The preserve is made to a grandmother's recipe, and that recipe is not Belgian, not French, and nothing else from the list usually standing behind a case of handmade bonbons.

Preslava Velkova makes those chocolates and works the bar where the coffee is served too. If you chocolate is among the participants at Good Coffee Festival in Sofia. What follows comes from a Slow Made City conversation ahead of the festival - ten short questions, none of them about turnover or locations.

The bell, the footsteps, the order

The question was whether she reads a person by the order or by the way they wait. It arrived too late: the reading starts at the door.

"I can tell who someone is the moment the bell on the door rings and I hear their footsteps. Sometimes you watch them come in tentatively, still unsure what they want, and in fact ready to order whatever you suggest."

PRESLAVA VELKOVA, IF YOU CHOCOLATE

"And then there are the ones who come in like a whirlwind, ready to take on the world before I have even opened my mouth. Their order is already clear in their head, everything is sorted. And you are just an irritating part of the detail around them."

PRESLAVA VELKOVA, IF YOU CHOCOLATE

The second sentence is harder on her than on the customer, which is why it rings true. The practical difference is what has to happen after the bell: one of them needs an offer, the other needs to be left alone. A case holding twenty kinds of bonbon works in opposite directions for the two - help for the hesitant one, delay for the one in a hurry.

The quiet before the first customer

What is silence to someone who works under the hiss of a machine? The answer was not about the absence of noise.

"Silence, when you are concentrated on the work, is the moment you are left alone with your thoughts. You can let yourself drift a little, daydream, relax, and above all put in order all the small and large tasks that look very complicated at first."

PRESLAVA VELKOVA, IF YOU CHOCOLATE

"Once you are alone with the silence, you start seeing them as much smaller pieces, you see how unimportant they are in the whole picture, and you realise there is nothing frightening about them. It is a moment of calm before we start."

PRESLAVA VELKOVA, IF YOU CHOCOLATE

In a kitchen that turns out both cakes and chocolate, that hour before opening does concrete work. It decides the order of the day: what gets tempered first, what has to set and how long it stays before it comes out of the mould. A wrong order cannot be fixed by hurrying later, because most of the steps are waiting on the material rather than on the person.

A diamond with rachel inside

The question about a recipe kept as a family secret usually closes with a smile. This one opened instead.

"One of our key diamonds, in fact the first one we started with, has rachel preserve inside. It is my favourite preserve and I know how to make it, and the recipe comes from my grandmother."

PRESLAVA VELKOVA, IF YOU CHOCOLATE

Rachel is a traditional preserve from southern Bulgaria, most often made from pumpkin, boiled by tradition with reduced grape must instead of sugar, the pieces kept crisp with lime water. It belongs to a pantry shelf, not to a pastry counter.

A wet filling is also the technical problem in the whole story. The sugar in a preserve has to bind enough of the water in it, or the shell weeps from the inside, the surface turns white and the bonbon does not survive its shelf life. Preserve inside chocolate is closer to an engineering problem than to a whim.

"Why a diamond? Because it is both an apology and an invitation. You can offer it on all sorts of occasions - as an explanation, as an apology, as a request, as a thank you, or even as a corporate gesture."

PRESLAVA VELKOVA, IF YOU CHOCOLATE

The shape here does the work of packaging for a message. About the rachel itself, Velkova adds that she still thinks nobody else has enclosed it in chocolate. The claim is not easy to check and does not need to be: what matters is which preserve was chosen. Not raspberry, not orange, but the jar from the winter shelf.

The cake that tells a biography

Asked which order tells a whole biography, she started from pastry, which she calls her first love.

"When people order a cake for an occasion, especially something of their own and very personal, an anniversary or a long-awaited event, they really are inclined to tell you part of their biography."

PRESLAVA VELKOVA, IF YOU CHOCOLATE

The order turns into an interview, and the person on the other side of the counter leaves holding information they never set out to collect. The pastry chef hears who is no longer speaking to whom, what the family does not mention and what exactly is being celebrated.

"We had a cake like that for an anniversary recently. The customer told us what she pictures, how she sees herself from the outside, what the theme is, and in the end we created something much further from the original idea but much closer to her heart."

PRESLAVA VELKOVA, IF YOU CHOCOLATE

With chocolate the same thing happens with fewer words and more surface.

"The devil is in the detail. We can tell a story with the colour of the chocolate, with its shine, with the shape and with what we have hidden inside. We have just made a black one, with an incredible shine and great depth of colour, and inside it hides a soft and quite spicy centre."

PRESLAVA VELKOVA, IF YOU CHOCOLATE

Shine, on that list, is not decoration but a certificate. It comes from tempering, from getting the cocoa butter to crystallise in the right form, and it is visible to the naked eye. A dull surface or white patches mean the temperatures were not held. The buyer reads the work without knowing that is what they are doing.

Coffee as an apology

When is chocolate an apology and when is it a reason? The question was put about coffee as well.

"Chocolate is an apology when we have run out of other ways to say we are sorry, or even when we are ashamed.

It is a sweet hand held out, and few people can refuse it."

PRESLAVA VELKOVA, IF YOU CHOCOLATE

"The same goes for coffee. Let us have a coffee is an unspoken apology and a way of saying you will find time for the person in front of you, that you will give them room in your schedule."

PRESLAVA VELKOVA, IF YOU CHOCOLATE

The invitation is measured in time rather than in a drink, which is exactly why it works. Someone who turns down the coffee is turning down half an hour, not an espresso.

"And as a reason - the moment we are afraid to step forward, or find it hard to start a conversation. A conversation can always be started over a cup of coffee and a piece of chocolate."

PRESLAVA VELKOVA, IF YOU CHOCOLATE

Both give the hands something to do and the conversation somewhere to pause. The difficult sentence usually arrives between two sips rather than at the start.

Fast is something that does not exist yet

What does the word fast mean in her vocabulary? The answer turned out to be a description of a mechanism.

"Fast means that before they have said the last word, mechanisms start turning in my head that look like an enormous clockwork. You start working out a plan for how the chocolate the customer forgot to order will be ready, so they can come by after 14:00 and collect it."

PRESLAVA VELKOVA, IF YOU CHOCOLATE

"That is fast - something that does not exist in time yet, but you already know how to deliver it."

PRESLAVA VELKOVA, IF YOU CHOCOLATE

The plan runs on somebody else's time, not on hers. Cocoa butter has to be tempered, the shell sets in a cool room, the filling needs to rest before it is closed, and the mould gives up the chocolate only once it has contracted enough to come out on its own. The clockwork in her head is counting those fixed stretches and finding where a forgotten customer fits between them.

The cappuccino she did not serve

Has she ever been ashamed of a cup she served? The answer came with an attempt number attached.

"I have had a situation like that with a cappuccino. The problem was the equipment behind the bar and the fact that the milk was not exactly barista milk, and we are trained to work with whatever is to hand, because sometimes you do not have ideal conditions."

PRESLAVA VELKOVA, IF YOU CHOCOLATE

"The first cup I did not serve, because it was awful, the second was no better, and the third went out with a lot of worry, because this customer was particular about cappuccino specifically."

PRESLAVA VELKOVA, IF YOU CHOCOLATE

Both things she names are real. Milk sold as barista milk is standardised for protein and fat so the foam holds, while ordinary milk behaves differently from batch to batch. The equipment decides the rest: steam pressure determines whether air goes into the milk or you end up with hot milk full of bubbles.

The counting is the more interesting part. Two cups poured away before the third is a decision that costs money and time while a customer is standing there waiting. Most places serve the first one.

Asked what her most difficult customer taught her, the answer was cut from the same cloth.

"Patience. The moment where you grit your teeth without showing how hard they are grinding, smile, and keep the same smile you started with."

PRESLAVA VELKOVA, IF YOU CHOCOLATE

A calm morning

The last question was what kind of morning she would give the person in front of her. The answer was one word.

"A calm one. I have come to see that it is missing from our whole daily life, even from our national temperament. We are used to being tense, fast, on edge, even when we have nothing urgent to do. It is as if we are anxious by default, as if it is woven into our genes."

PRESLAVA VELKOVA, IF YOU CHOCOLATE

"The moment I smile across the counter and somebody picks the smile up, you see them relax. They say good morning in a slightly brighter tone, they are smiling, and somehow it sits more lightly on them."

PRESLAVA VELKOVA, IF YOU CHOCOLATE

It is also the only thing in the entire conversation that does not depend on a recipe, a temperature or a machine. If you chocolate will be among the participants in front of NDK from 11 to 13 September.

The nicest thing she has heard at the counter was not said to her. Yesterday, with her back turned while somebody was tasting: "Oh, this is very good." She never did find out which chocolate they meant.