For years, people went looking for Los Angeles Historical-Cultural Monument No. 137: a Dutch-themed hot chocolate shop that was one of Ernest Batchelder’s earliest commissions. They came to a ...

The historic Dutch Chocolate Shop ... the shop that once specialized in hot chocolate is a city historic-cultural monument. The ground-floor space has survived more than a century of changing ...

So where hot cacao is ground directly from a cacao tree, hot chocolate is contingent on cacao first being made into chocolate — which traces back to Dutch chemist Coenraad Johannes van Houten.