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If you walk into Alegio Chocolaté on Bryant Street and meet co-owner Panos Panagos, you are sure to leave the store with the flavors of the African rainforest on your palate, visions of cacao being cultivated in the equatorial island nation of São Tomé and Príncipe and fables of Claudio Corallo, an Italian agronomist who has made the tropical plantations of Terreiro Velho his home. And you’ll probably have at least one of his fawn-colored chocolate boxes in your hand.
Call him a good salesman at your own risk, though. “That’s the worst insult for me; this is more than selling one box of chocolate!” said 70-year-old Panagos. He and his business partner Robbin Everson have been distributing Corallo’s chocolates since 2006, first through their store in Berkeley, which they ran for around 13 years, and now through their Palo Alto store, which has been in business since 2012.
Panagos fumed as he spoke of what he believes is overprocessed, industrialized cacao, routinely doused in vanilla and soy lecithin — what he calls “mass-produced rubbish” — that masquerades as chocolate today.
“People, generally speaking, don’t understand chocolate, they don’t know chocolate, they don’t know what chocolate is and they don’t know what it could be,” he said.
Alegio chocolates, available in varying percentages of pure cacao, are minimally flavored with either crystallized sugar, ginger, orange peels, raisins, coffee, sea salt, pepper or little bits of raw cacao nibs. A 160-gram box of chocolates costs $38.50.
The story of how he came across this product is multihued. Before he became a chocolate distributor, Panagos – originally from Trikala in Greece – worked in the film and television industry.
He studied and later worked under the tutelage of underground and avant-garde filmmaker George Kuchar at the San Francisco Art Institute. “He taught me so much, I would need three lives to be able to appreciate and show gratefulness to that man,” he said. “George Kuchar initiated me into filmmaking…My philosophy was shaped there.”
Over the years, Panagos worked both in San Francisco — he was one of the directors of the 1980s hit TV show “Evening Magazine,” hosted by Richard Hart and Jan Yanehiro — and later across Europe, where he worked for the European Broadcasting Commission as a representative of Greek television. He has several documentaries and TV shows to his credit, including “Jammin,” a popular Greek show he created in the 1990s.
Panagos first heard about Corallo’s African escapade when a project for the Associated Press took him to Ethiopia in the mid-’80s to cover one of the worst famines of the 20th century. “People were dying on the streets,” said Panagos, his young, photojournalist alter ego resurfacing momentarily as the present-day Silicon Valley entrepreneur excavated memories.
It was while driving the roads of Ethiopia in a United Nations Jeep at the crack of dawn, photographing food packages dropped by American and Russian airplanes, that a Zimbabwean journalist told him about Corallo. “It was there when she started talking to me about ‘that man’ — at the time I had no idea about this character named Claudio Corallo — who reminded me of ‘Apocalypse Now.’”
The 1979 Francis Coppola movie he referenced is based on author Joseph Conrad’s novel “The Heart of Darkness,” whose plot unfolds along the Congo River in Africa. Corallo, dubbed the “Italian Indiana Jones,” is originally from Florence, Italy. In the 1970s, he left Europe to live in Congo, known as Zaire back then. He started growing his own coffee — which he sells across countries like France, Italy, Portugal and the Czech Republic today — and subsequently fell in love with cacao. Corallo has lived in Africa for around 50 years now.
It wasn’t until many years later – around the early 2000s, when Panagos was looking to pivot away from his travel-heavy media career and try something new – that he rediscovered Corallo. “I was looking for something unique and different,” he said.
He asked an economist friend to help him understand what the “next big thing” was. It turned out that olive oil, balsamic vinegar, wine and coffee had all had their moment of becoming gourmet. The answer, quite simply, was chocolate.
Panagos then remembered the mysterious “guy from Congo” that the Zimbabwean journalist had told him about all those years ago. By then, Corallo had become a name to reckon with in the world of coffee and chocolate.
“The next thing? I took a trip to Africa. The next thing? We became too close,” Panagos said. “I believe I was the only one who deeply understood not the chocolate maker, but the man — who he was as a man, his philosophy about life… and dare I say, I met my match. Most of the collaboration was not about the product per se; it was about the philosophy around that product.”
Alegio is named after Panagos’ sons Alexander and Giorgio. For Panagos and his business partner and “second brain” Everson — who was a high-tech sales executive before Alegio — expansion is not a priority.
“I don’t want to open more shops,” he said. “We have very limited production; Claudio will never compromise on quality.” That said, he does dream of opening a store in a chic neighborhood like Century City, Los Angeles, someday.
For now, they are focused on bringing small batch, high quality chocolate to Silicon Valley. “People who have refined taste and less tired minds start looking for things that make life beautiful,” Panagos said.
Alegio Chocolaté, 522 Bryant St., Palo Alto; 650-325-4500, Instagram: @alegio_chocolate. Open Tuesday to Thursday from noon to 6 p.m., Friday and Saturday from noon to 7 p.m.
Correction: This article has been modified to correct a spelling error.
