Before the creation of Pumpkin Spice, there was…
Arriving at the Fall Equinox to open our holiday season on September 22nd, XENIA is at once a study of the botanical medicines and the flavors of antiquity, and an invitation to practice its most enduring wisdom. Welcome, ChocoLovers, to our 2026-27 Holiday Season!
WELCOME! Enjoy a complimentary date-sweetened Pumpkin Spice with every order of XENIA!
A dense jam of smyrna fig, pomegranate, raspberry, grape, and fennel pollen meets our leptokarion-itrion crème, inspired by the ancient sesame preparation but made with dates instead of honey - with sesame, hazelnuts, and olive oil, then finished with Adriatic salt and precious filaments of saffron. With its sweetness derived only from dates and dried fruit, XENIA is deliberately less sweet than our other creations, allowing the earthy jamminess and complex nuttiness to speak with unusual but harmonious clarity.
XENIA is our meditation on The Odyssey’s sacred law of hospitality, and an expression of the enduring Golden Rule that echoes across civilizations. Inspired by Homer and our study of Dioscorides’ De Materia Medica, we composed this truffle-style bar almost exclusively from ingredients available to the Mediterranean world during Homeric times, with a few deliberate anachronisms. Arriving at the Fall Equinox to open our holiday season, it is at once an exploration of botanical antiquity and an invitation to practice its most enduring wisdom: come to our table, welcome the stranger, and taste antiquity.
INGREDIENTS: raw cacao beans*, ground dates*, Smyrna figs*, raw hazelnuts*, raw sesame seeds*, raw cashews*, Corinthian grapes*, pomegranate*, raspberries*, extra virgin olive oil*, Adriatic sea salt, fennel pollen**, saffron**, Love.
A dense jam of pomegranate, raspberry, grape, fig, and fennel pollen meets our leptokarion-itrion crème, inspired by the ancient preparation - with sesame, hazelnuts, and olive oil, finished with Adriatic salt and precious filaments of saffron. With sweetness derived only from dates and dried fruit, XENIA is deliberately less sweet than our other creations, allowing the earthy jamminess to speak with unusual but harmonious clarity.
