Smooth Operator

In the summer of 2023, Aaron Lindstrom became a free agent. After a decade working in the chocolate industry, the former director of chocolate experiences at Theo Chocolate lost his job when the Fremont factory closed its doors. He decided to put his résumé to work and start his own chocolate biz, starting with importing ethically sourced, single-origin cacao from Colombia and Peru. But because his other great love is music, it would also be a venue, he imagined, as well as a daytime cafe serving coffee and chocolate. Lindstrom, who is queer and Latino, also wanted the project to be an inclusive space that would spotlight queer, BIPOC, and female talent. A chocolate community center. “I just grabbed as many people as I could,” Lindstrom says of the Theo exodus. “Most of my favorite team members at Theo, they work here now.”

He and his team opened Cocoa Legato in early 2025, traversing a rocky road as they took over a long-vacant meal-prep kitchen at 85th and Greenwood. The team handled the massive build-out themselves and fabricated everything: the stage, the sound system, all the electrical, the barista station and all the plumbing within, the bathroom (with cladding made from old cassette tapes), and the entire chocolate processing works. It took almost two years to open, about twice as long as anticipated. The result is the combination coffee shop/chocolate factory/music venue of Lindstrom’s rich, decadent dreams.

Born in Colombia and adopted by a Mercer Island family as a baby, Lindstrom points out that visibility as a Latino chocolate maker is huge, since faces like his aren’t common in the American chocolate game. “A lot of the chocolate industry is powered by white straight men,” he explains. “There are not a lot of brown people making chocolate in this country, and especially people from the places where the chocolate actually grows natively. Colombia, Peru, Ecuador.”

Queer-owned chocolate producers are also unusual in this country, Lindstrom adds, and as such, representation and inclusivity are crucial parts of Cocoa Legato’s ethos. “That’s also why my chocolate is all vegan and nut-free,” he says. “We only make dark chocolate, no milk chocolate. I’m not personally a vegan, and I don’t have nut allergies. I just want everyone to be able to eat it.”

Lucky for everyone, because this is extremely high-quality chocolate, whether in bar form or via the cafe’s luxurious chocolate-enhanced grilled cheese sandwich. Following a tour of the chocolate factory and a few samples of different cacao quotients, I was ready to argue it’s the best chocolate that’s being made here in Seattle, by an order of magnitude.

The cafe space shares a Venn intersection with the venue seating. Its menu is small, and everything is tinged with chocolate, sometimes in places where you feel like maybe it shouldn’t be, e.g., the avocado toast is drizzled with a cocoa nib balsamic dressing. Their mocha is a big focal point, understandably. (“We get told almost daily that our mocha is the best in the world,” Lindstrom says.) The S’More Pride and the Mousse Springsteen are pretty choco-normative expressions, and there’s a whole coda on sipping chocolate. Chocolate-imbued tea is a curious intermezzo. I’d brought a friend along, who ordered the green salad with caramelized cocoa nibs, garbanzos, and the same chocolatey vinaigrette. It’s nice! The unsweetened nibs seem like dried fruit, maybe blueberries. Little chocolate Nerds.

Foodwise, that chocolate grilled cheese is the prima donna of the menu, served on buttered Cottage Bakery bread with a molten alloy of housemade chocolate and white cheddar burbling down the sides. Certainly weird but no less delicious, it’s kind of cheesecake-coded and tastes like a Ween song. “It has cheddar-on-apple-pie logic working for it,” my buddy remarks. Even a chocolate layman like me can sniff out the tremendous quality of the cacao here, despite it being anointed by Beecher’s Flagship cheese oil.

I take home a bar of 80% Peruvian, and inside the packaging, I find a QR code that leads to a “music pairing” playlist. Mine links to “OWNO,” a track by Seattle-based R&B artist Young-Chhaylee, and I put it on the big stereo while I savor the goods. The “tasting notes” on the back describe it as fruity, a word I never really thought of as pertaining to chocolate. Along with being bold and intense, it’s indeed delicately fruity, and I think back to the caramelized cacao Nerds in the salad that I thought were berries at first. There are tones of lemon and mango and lychee. A whiff of banana in there, too, maybe ginger.

Perhaps I’ve been thinking about chocolate wrong. All my life, I’ve approached it as a sugary confection—a dessert, not a plant. This seems like first-day-on-Earth shit in retrospect, but… a cacao pod is botanically a fruit, of course, which is why it can also work in things like salads and sandwiches. The concept suddenly snapped into place, like a metric shift on a song, where the downbeat is moved and now the whole aesthetic feels different. Chocolate is fruit. Right. This is why people love this song so much.

If building a music venue inside a chocolate factory doesn’t seem like the most organic move, well, it is if you’re Lindstrom, a lifelong musician who’s singing and playing guitar and/or bass in “four or five different bands” currently. “Music was always going to be a part of this concept,” he says. Bands play on weekends, and while genres err toward folk and jazz, it’s not limited.

“The other day,” he says, “we had CenterPlay, and the drummer just killed it. It made me love her even more. We had a fusion band in here the other day that had marimbas. We’ve had bands that come with live dancers. We’re open to anything, honestly.”

Yet another unique aspect here is that Cocoa Legato is a bean-to-bar producer, meaning Lindstrom imports raw fermented cacao beans directly from farms in South America, then roasts, winnows, mills, tempers, and molds them into chocolate bars. This is all done on-site, in his adorable (subjectively) miniature chocolate factory—which is open for free tours, by the way.

Ultimately, the name perfectly subsumes Lindstrom’s whole notion and melds all the different elements together. Legato means “smooth” in Italian—a directional note for a musical passage to be played in a fluid, even style. “I chose it because it’s exactly how I think about chocolate,” Lindstrom says, “and the aesthetic of the venue, too. I want people to walk by and hear music flowing and then look in the window, at the factory, and see chocolate flowing. That was what I was dreaming of all along.” 

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