Meet Vivienne sure Malle, one of chef Maxime Frédéric’s most whimsical creations

When it comes to the sweet treats at the new Louis Vuitton chocolate shop in New York City, pastry chef Maxime Frédéric can’t help but play favourites.

While examples of cacao from Madagascar, Peru, and São Tomé all have their virtues, Frédéric says, he’s particularly fond of a supplier from the Dominican Republic. The small-scale nature reserve and cacao farm produces such “magical” flavors that he claims he could pick it out of a blind taste test of “a thousand chocolates” thanks to its character and distinctly intense profile: dark, bitter, raw, earthy, and coffee-like. “It’s dark chocolate that travels down to the ends of your fingertips,” he says.

In November, Le Chocolat Maxime Frédéric at Louis Vuitton opened its first U.S. outpost at the French brand’s newest flagship store, located at 6 E. 57th St. in Manhattan. The five-story retail and exhibition space is the Maison’s largest American boutique and the first in the nation to house a Vuitton café and chocolatier.

Frédéric’s territory here follows locations in Paris, Singapore, and Shanghai. Each branch serves confections handmade in Paris by a team of 40, who use milk, butter, eggs, and nuts from small farms and suppliers across France. Many of the bonbons are intricately emblazoned with Vuitton’s signatures—the four-pointed star, four-petal flower, diamond flower, and LV initials—while chocolate bars are branded with the Damier Ebène checkerboard print.

But Frédéric’s true masterpiece is the US$350 Vivienne sur Malle (Vivienne on a trunk), as delicious as it is whimsical, in which the brand’s mascot, Vivienne, “pirouettes” atop a miniature LV case. The fanciful creation was inspired by the house’s artisans, its watchmaking and trunkmaking heritage, and the Vivienne music box. It took three months of trial and error and hundreds of iterations to get the size and shape just right. It helps that Frédéric’s father, Daniel, was a mechanic—a heritage the chef leaned in to when assembling the gears. Putting a single Vivienne together takes over three hours, and the finished example weighs around two and a half pounds.

“It’s funny because when people see it, they don’t understand that it can turn,” Frédéric says. “It’s only when you turn the key and the magic happens that even the big kids marvel at the sculpture.”

Above, a closer look at what makes the chocolate statuette move.

This story was first published on Robb Report USA