To sate this craving, no fewer than four boutique chocolate-makers have come to Manhattan in the past year. Two are locals: Jacques Torres, the celebrated Brooklyn chocolatier, has opened a grand chocolate factory in downtown Manhattan that would make Willy Wonka envious, while business woman Kathy Moskal has redesigned a loft in the garment district for Vere’s all-natural confections.

Debauve & Gallais, a 204-year-old French chocolatier, occupies a jewel-box space on the most expensive commercial strip in Manhattan, while Scharffen Berger, started by a doctor and wine-maker in Berkeley, California, but recently sold to Hershey, has a sliver-sized shop on the Upper West Side. Despite different approaches, the four are striving to broaden the appeal of good chocolate.

Robert Steinberg and John Scharffenberger’s expertise is chocolate bars. They started Scharffen Berger in 1996 with a bittersweet one - 70 per cent cacao - that has an astringent, tangy taste. "It was different enough and intense enough in flavour, and it showed that we were really sourcing the beans," says Steinberg.

They now have bars ranging from milk chocolate that is 41 per cent cacao to extra dark with 82 per cent cacao.

For the opening of their shop in New York last year, they introduced a range of chocolates. "I said it’s time to do the confections if we’re going to be in New York," said Scharffenberger, before the sale to Hershey.

Wrapped in a thin layer of ganache, the 12 varieties within the range were devised by Sebastian Baline, a fourth-generation French chocolate-maker. Nibs Nougatine is the company’s signature truffle with crunchy bits of "nib" - shelled pieces of the bean - throughout. Its Yunan Tea, infused mint tea, has a refreshing, tart taste, while the Fresh Lemon truffle has a zesty flavour that comes from the juice of Eureka lemons.

For your money, however, Jacques Torres’ chocolates achieve a higher level of artistry. Its Heart of Passion is an addictive mixture of sweet textures. The Gold Espresso, flecked with 24 carat gold, packs a strong, clean jolt, while the Earl Grey is subtle, like the tea itself. With Torres, what you taste is what you get: "Our recipes are very simple: no filler, nothing you don’t know the name of," hey says.

Among chocolate-lovers, Torres’ brown and orange boxes engender the type of heart-fluttering usually reserved for a powder-blue box from Tiffany.

Torres is the innovator of the bunch, willing to risk failure with such concoctions as Wicket Hot Chocolate, made with ancho chillies and smoked chipotle peppers to honour the chocolate-makers of Mexico (it doesn’t fail).

Debauve & Gallais is the standard bearer, not tinkering with formulas that have served it well for two centuries. One of its most intriguing creations is a mouth-drying 99 per cent cacao bar - with the other one per cent divided between sugar and spice. "It goes very well with vodka, saké and coffee," says Bernard Poussin, the company’s seventh-generation owner. "We used to export it to the czars of Russia."

Debauve & Gallais’s chocolates are reliable - and expensive, at upwards of $100 a pound. The signature Crème Brulée chocolate, with its 72 per cent cacao covering, is tasty, while the 85 per cent ganache with silver foil on top stands out as a creamy tangy delight.

More than the others, Vere could be the sign that dark chocolate is following wine and olive oil into the mouths and minds of upper-middle-class New Yorkers. Moskal made her fortune as the founder of Hue, one of the first companies to manufacture coloured hosiery. She only became interested in chocolate a few years ago when a diabetic friend was dying and craved a chocolate she could eat. When Moskal’s search turned up poor-quality substitutes for real chocolate, she hired a chef to make chocolate using the finest ingredients.

Now Vere’s bars - and a number of its individual chocolates, including one filled with soy - are vegan, while its brownies are gluten-free. The company uses only arriba beans from Ecuador that are pesticide free and avoids artificial sugars. That does not detract from their flavour, particularly the sensuous Cream and Cognac truffles.

"We like to think of our chocolates as being as different from other chocolates as an Heirloom tomato is from your standard green-house-grown tomato," says Moskal. "If you start with the best tomato, you don’t need to do too much to it, except nurture what’s already there."