Rushville chocolate company seeing surging demand
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As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowA hidden gem in Rush County is becoming a confectionery hot spot.
Tucked inside a nondescript strip mall in Rushville is Chocolat Cafe, and along with it, a line of people that snakes around the corner, hoping to score whatever sweet treat is on that day’s menu before it sells out.
Owner Dustin Cornett says demand for the company’s treats has been huge, sometimes selling out within a half hour of opening for the day.
“The word of mouth and then on social media has been great,” Cornett said. “That’s been the best way to reach everybody. I haven’t really wanted to promote because I haven’t been able to keep up with everything.”
Cornett and his wife previously ran a cafe and inn in eastern Kentucky, but decided to sell the property after having their first child and running into difficulties in running the business. He said a conversation with family members in Indiana led to the idea to explore potentially setting up shop in Rushville.
“I started doing some research about Rushville and actually made an appointment to talk with the mayor and some other people,” Cornett said. “I was really impressed with the direction they were going. So I thought this might be the perfect place for us to move.”
Chocolat Cafe offers a variety of sweets, including cheesecakes, Danishes, croissants and other pastries. But the big attraction is the cafe’s chocolate candies, the recipe for which comes from Cornett’s grandmother.
“My grandma was kind of a legend back in the day for making these box chocolates in Connersville,” he said. “So my wife and I, we’ve kind of played around, and we made these confections and they were just amazing. I didn’t want to see those recipes go away. Grandma used Hershey’s chocolate, which back in the day was was okay, but now I wanted to do better. So I decided to create my own chocolate to coat my grandma’s recipes.”
Cornett prides himself on being a “bean to bar” chocolate maker.
“It’s kind of a rare thing. I believe there’s only a handful of us in the whole state of Indiana,” he said. “You take the agricultural product of the cacao and you roast it and you grind it and grind it for about three days. And then at the end of the process, you have chocolate, and then you have to temper the chocolate, mold into a bar. It takes about a week to do that.”
The cafe has only been open a little over a month, and Cornett said they continue to see lines out the door, to the point where they have to meticulously plan out their offerings to avoid customers having to deal with long waits.
“I had to come up with a different type of slow openings; we’ll just do pastries one day and just do coffee one day,” he said. “Seasonally, we’ll do confections, and when things slow down, we’ll be able to add more things like a chocolate spread, chocolate covered nuts and things like that. I just don’t have time to do those right now. [It’s] just my wife and I that are doing it. So we put our passion and love into it, and we thought a small town like Russia would be a great fit for that.”
Thanks to the Cornetts’ efforts, for the first time ever, downtown Rushville will host the Midwest Craft Chocolate Festival in late November.
“We’ll have other craft chocolate makers from around the region, around the nation, around the globe come to Rushville sell their products,” he said. “We’ll do a bunch of educational programs to tastings where we can teach what we’re doing, why it’s important and educate the general public about why you should buy craft chocolate.”