Sunset Park has the golden ticket!
Brooklyn Army Terminal just got a lot sweeter — French chocolatier Jacques Torres finally opened the doors of his state-of-the-art chocolate factory on Feb. 1, three years to the day after he started relocating operations from Dumbo and Manhattan to the behemoth Sunset Park facility. The Willy Wonka-esque master chocolatier built the factory himself — but it still inspires awe in him, he said.
“I could never imagine building something like this,” Torres said. “In the morning, when I come in and turn on the lights and there’s nobody here, I cannot believe my eyes — even though I built it myself.”
And chocolate lovers will soon be able to see it all themselves — Torres plans to open the football field-sized factory for public tours and let gawkers buy treats at direct-from-the-factory prices, he said.
The confectioner wants tour-takers to ask about any part of the chocolate-making process so they see first-hand that his operation is the real McCoy.
“We are real and do the real thing — I want my customers to understand that, to smell that, and to touch that,” he said.
Torres had not heard of Brooklyn Army Terminal when he started looking for spaces to expand his operation, but fell in love with it after a friend took him for a tour and lectured him about its storied history, he said.
The campus on the border of Sunset Park and Bay Ridge served as one of the nation’s busiest terminals during World War II, employing more than 20,000 buzzing workers, according to information from the Economic Development Commission, which bought and renovated the site in the 1980s and now leases the four-block-long facility to private industrial clients.
The Sunset Park factory may be Brooklyn’s sweetest new destination, but Dumbo-ites needn’t fear — Torres will keep his Water Street facility open and transform the manufacturing space into additional retail, he said.
