You can smell it before you see it — chocolate. Warm, sweet, and drifting across half a block. That's Ghirardelli Square, and the man who started it was an Italian chocolatier who came to California for gold and found out he was terrible at it.
Domingo Ghirardelli apprenticed as a chocolatier in Genoa, moved to South America, and ended up in Lima, Peru. His neighbor there — a piano maker named James Lick — sailed to San Francisco in eighteen forty-eight carrying six hundred pounds of Ghirardelli's chocolate. Six hundred pounds. Not gold dust, not mining equipment — chocolate. It sold out within days. Ghirardelli followed a year later, tried prospecting in the Sierra foothills, lasted about two miserable weeks, and quit.
When his business partner asked him why he gave up, Ghirardelli reportedly said: I spent fourteen days pulling rocks from a river and found nothing. Then I sold a bag of chocolate in a mining camp for six dollars. The river can keep its gold.
He opened a store, then
a factory, and the company has been in continuous operation since eighteen fifty-two — which makes Ghirardelli older than the Republican Party, older than the Transcontinental Railroad, and older than the state of Oregon.
But here's the story I really want to tell you, because it's the payoff to something I mentioned at the very beginning of this tour.
James Lick — the piano maker who carried th
