food@colgate: A SWEET! Experience

As much as I loved my Thanksgiving meal experience and all of the incredible food it included, the food highlight of my break took place on Friday while I was out and about enjoying the beautiful 75-degree weather of fall in Southern California. My mom, my two sisters and I decided to check out one of the newest tourist spots in LA, so we ventured to Sweet!, a brand new 28,000 square foot candy store filled with 5 different candy boutiques. Located in the heart of Hollywood, Sweet! is the only candy store of its kind in the area, and it plays into the completely-overdone-touristy nature of much of Hollywood. HOLY COW was this place awesome! It was like a normal candy store on steroids and I have honestly never seen anything quite like it.

To name only a few of the cool things inside of this candy store, it had a shiny red (and real!) Ferrari with gumballs flying out of it, a station for make your own chocolate bars with custom-designed wrappers, a “Willy Wonka Inventing Room” full of chocolate and a real-live Willy Wonka walking around, candy dispensed from urinals, an entire “Hollywood room” with chocolate Oscars and a red carpet, rainbow-colored hard candy made live at the store with customized words written straight through the middle of it, giant murals of both Harry Potter and Marilyn Monroe made completely of Jelly Bellys and so much more…

One of the weirdest things I saw in Sweet! was an entire wall of the store dedicated to bacon-flavored candy. This wall was located inside of the “Yuck!” room in the store (which was full of all different “gross” and odd candy) and had everything from bacon-flavored cookies, mints, and chewing gum to bacon themed board games. As amusing as the bacon wall was, my favorite part of my trip to Sweet! was definitely watching sugar artisans in the back of the store configure colored lumps of melted sugar into a certain patterns which they then pulled out into 20 foot long pieces and cut into small pieces of candy. What they were doing was truly an art.

In light of our class conversation about “American excess” when it comes to food and our over the top eating habits on holidays like Thanksgiving, I couldn’t help but think about my experience at Sweet! as epitomizing the idea of excess in food. Everyone knows the term “like a kid in a candy store,” but this candy store brought this saying to a whole new level. I was so overwhelmed by all of the options in the store that I think my enjoyment of the entire experience was at least slightly hindered. That is not to say that I didn’t enjoy the custom made candy bar (full of caramel, pop rocks and hot Cheetos) that my sister created, or that I didn’t get a kick out of seeing a real live Willy Wonka who looked almost identical to Johnny Depp’s Wonka; it is just to say that the candy store was definitely over the top. Obviously Hollywood Blvd is a huge tourist destination so it makes sense that Sweet! would exist there, but I couldn’t help but think about Sweet! more critically than the average LA tourist would.