The Aztecs believed that cacao beans, the raw material of chocolate, gave them wisdom and knowledge. The beans were so highly prized that the Aztecs used them as money. More readily verifiable, Hernando Cortes carried the first cacao beans to Europe from the New World. He might have fantasized a shop like Santa Fe’s Todos Santos, but it would have been a wild, improbable dream.

From this tiny shop owned by Hayward Simoneaux comes some of the finest chocolate in the United States. Chocolatier, the gourmet chocolate industry’s magazine, named Simoneaux one of the 10 best artisan chocolatiers in the country in 2001. Todos Santos fits right into Santa Fe’s Sena Plaza, which, like a secret garden, is thick with shrubs, trees, and overgrown beds of irises and poppies. Todos Santos—“all saints” in Spanish—is so dense with sweets the air in the shop makes you swoon.

Simoneaux has put his own stamp on the New World treasure of chocolate. The owner combines his lifelong love of sweets with New Mexican culture to make chocolate milagros. Usually made of metal, Catholic milagros (“miracles”) are spiritual emblems, representations of everyday objects, body parts, and symbols such as the flaming heart that believers offer to saints either for protection or in thanks. Simoneaux adds one other ingredient to his chocolate milagros the conquistadores would have appreciated: a thin veneer of gold, 23 or 24 carat, no more, no less. Gilded milagros are Simoneaux’s signature pieces. He also uses silver, for instance to coat a chocolate concha belt buckle.

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