BALTIMORE — Jinji Chocolate has a new place to call home at 3100 Greenmount Avenue. It's a bigger place to share the desirable treats.
"Belvedere is great but we had this running joke that our chocolate isn't going to taste like bacon grease anymore because while we're there it's like the whole atmosphere is just breakfast food, dinner food. And chocolate is just so vulnerable and sensitive to everything that's around,” said Jinji Fraser who is the Cofounder and Owner of Jinji Chocolate.
Jinji Chocolate was an idea that started back in 2012 after Jenji Fraser came across some raw chocolate classes while working at Under Armour.
"The sound fit, the smell fit, the process fit, it was all just something I wanted to do and make my life,” said Fraser.
Stepping away from the corporate world, a few months later she was taking the skills she learned and making them her own.
"It sounds crazy but it's as if time had no place in the idea. I had no idea how long it would be, my dad told me I think it'll be for about three years and I thought ok,” said Fraser.
Now 11 years later, she and Jinji Chocolate Manager Jonathan Seton have reached goals they never thought possible.
"We're putting ourselves out there, we're trying something new we weren't really sure how people would respond,” said Seton.
For Seton chocolate making is a journey. "I might go into it thinking that it is going to have an end result in a certain way and then I try to taste it with that in mind but also paying attention to what it has decided it wanted to become.”
With a world of ingredients to choose from Fraser said chocolate becomes a form of art.
"We're living in a climate right now where there is all kinds of political issues and interpersonal struggles,” Fraser said. “We're not unaffected so we can kind of take in these stories and ask ourselves well what would that taste like and what would that feel like if it was a piece of chocolate.”
She brings international flavors to tell the local story.
"So cacao which is the fruit that chocolate comes from so that we import from actually Trinidad right now., Trinidad and Peru. The add ins to the chocolate like the fillings in our truffles or the toppings on our fudge things like that, those will come locally,” said Fraser.
With a new location comes a few new items in liquid form. "it's been an ambition and a dream for a long time to have drinking chocolate. We're starting with a five drink menu two of them are hot three of them are cold drinks,” said Fraser.
For customers like Justin Miles the new spot brings a fresh option to the neighborhood.
"It takes into account that there are a diversity of people and ideas and desires more than just the conventional stores that we have around here. We want to have options we want to have difference in the neighborhood,” said Miles who lives in the neighborhood.
Fraser said she doesn't know what's ahead but says the best is yet to come.
