The upmarket chocolate shop has come to London with a scientific store design that gives sweet shopping a grown-up setting.

Chocolate is the new coffee is the new beer is the new… Well whatever the case, if the prices in the Brooklyn-based Mast Brothers’ newly opened chocolate factory-cum-shop in Shoreditch are anything to go by, then chocolate is the new caviar.

At £8 a bar, there were not vast numbers of visitors, but they were missing out. This is a grown-up chocolate experience which has an almost science lab-like interior where those with deep pockets can enjoy chocolate on sourdough bread while staring through at the shiny metal drums in the factory, which is behind a floor-to-ceiling glass wall.

Two mid-shop plain wood plinths serve as display units for the jauntily packaged chocolate bars.

This is a very niche offer and perfectly in tune with the neighbourhood. It should attract the same sort of clientele as it does back home in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.