Knoops

Hot chocolate here comes with a small decision tree before a spoon touches the cup. You pick a cocoa percentage, anywhere from a pale 28% white through to a properly bitter 100% dark, then choose your milk (whole, oat, almond) and whether you want sea salt, chilli or orange folded through. It sounds fussy for a drink most people order on autopilot, but the system works because the staff will talk you through it if you look lost, and the difference between a 47% and a 61% is genuinely noticeable once you taste them side by side.

The Covent Garden branch, tucked on New Row just off St Martin’s Lane, is a narrow counter shop rather than a café you settle into for an afternoon. There are a handful of stools and a bench, but most people order to take away and keep walking towards Leicester Square or the market. It suits that use case well: a warm-up stop on a cold day, or a treat after the theatre rather than a destination in its own right.

The 70% dark with oat milk is the one worth trying first if you want to understand what the fuss is about, since it holds its bitterness without tipping into chalky. In summer the iced version, blended rather than just chilled, is a genuinely good alternative to an iced coffee. Marshmallows are proper and squidgy rather than the dried supermarket kind, and the extra sea salt on a dark chocolate is worth the fifty pence.

A cup runs to around £5 to £6 depending on size and extras, which is steep for what is essentially warm milk and cocoa, but the ingredients (Knoops works with named chocolate makers rather than a generic blend) justify some of that premium. It suits chocolate obsessives, families with children who want something more interesting than a Costa hot chocolate, and anyone who wants a proper English tea time indulgence.

The honest caveat is queue length. Because every drink is made from scratch to your specification, service slows right down whenever more than three or four people are ahead of you, and the shop itself is too small to absorb a rush comfortably. There’s no booking system, you simply turn up and wait your turn, which is fine on a quiet weekday morning and considerably less fine on a Saturday afternoon in December.