If you’re real lucky, lucky like I am, you’re blessed with wonderful friends who, despite the fact that they literally live a full continent away from one another and are deeply, madly, still newly in love, agree to spend a day walking around the city you’re visiting.

On this walk, we tilted from tourist district to full on moms-with-strollers ‘hood and Jason guided us toward the most adorable candy store with a name that means “crumb” his French wife-to-be translated for us. Cakes, candies and other confections awaited us while Anna squeed with delight over the nickel candies she recognized from back home as a kiddo. I sorted through several, made some obvious choices (the chocolate bourbon bar, the bacon maple lollipop, a handful of fleur de sel caramels) when I found myself eavesdropping on the woman behind the counter.

“We just got a box of black truffle chocolate bars,” she was explaining into the phone.

I was intrigued, to say the least. She continued her conversation, I continued rudely listening, until finally it was time to pay.

“Did I hear you say you had black truffle chocolate?” I’ll admit, I was rather unapologetic for invading her privacy.

She seemed hesitant to sell me one of the bars — they hadn’t tried them yet, weren’t sure they were going to stock them or something. I told her I didn’t care, didn’t care what they cost, either, I’d love to have one. Twelve dollars for two-and-a-half ounces later and I was the proud owner of a Mast Brothers Dark Chocolate + Black Truffles, Sea Salt (72% cacao from Madagascar, because when you’re paying $5/oz for chocolate you want to know it’s provenance) bar.

We kept wandering and hit Dolores Park, where we used our scarves to wipe down a bench and try the hard fought chocolate (the salted caramels didn’t make it a block). The salt comes first then quickly the bitter dark chocolate. There’s truffle there to be sure but you have to search for it, occasionally an earthy clod stands out, but mostly it’s a whiff. We took it in for a bit then decided a glass of wine might serve us well, which a just-opened bar was happy to help us with. I attempted a Zinfandel and the two complemented each other nicely.

Soon, new confederates joined us, there were more bottles, plates of cheese and recommended starters, more stories and catching up. Jason and Anna left for a date.