Lemon Marble Chocolate

Brand: Meiji

Cost: 100 yen

Found At: Family Mart, Osaka

The Meiji chocolate headquarters in the Tokyo area has the best building design I have ever seen. Move over Kanazawa art museum, there’s a new architectural innovator in town. The wall facing the Shinkansen is designed to look exactly like a giant Meiji chocolate bar. The perfect fusion of advertisement and architecture and, most importantly, chocolate. If I ever make millions, I know who I will hire to design my mansion.

And they have good reason to be proud, because Meiji has never failed me. When I need a chocolate bar at a moment’s notice, I know that Meiji is ready and waiting to do the job right. This Lemon Marble chocolate is a perfect example. It is the ideal summer chocolate, with the sweet milk chocolate folded into a perfectly lemony white chocolate. It’s like Thanksgiving, when you put a slice of lemon meringue and a brownie on the same plate and feel no shame. The lemon is so strong and so creamy and there is something deliciously antebellum about it. With every bite, I think of southern bells on hot days, fanning themselves in the sun. And perhaps that’s a perfect analogy, because with a chocolate so cheap and delicious, you have to wonder whether there is someone suffering for it.

I hope not. Because this chocolate delicious.