Dear Mr. Gold:

Another NYC food craving: I apologize. I know you’ve written about mail-ordering chocolate-covered pretzels at Li-Lac in Greenwich Village, one of my favorite things in the universe. Mail order is good — e-tail is another one of my favorite things. But this time of year, chocolate does not tend to make it from Manhattan to Santa Monica without melting into an unrecognizable glop. Surely there must be a chocolate pretzel somewhere in the Greater Los Angeles area.

—Sara, Santa Monica

Dear Sara:

I’ve experienced the Chocolate Soup effect myself. It is annoying, even if you are in the habit of attacking the day’s UPS shipments with a spoon. But the chocolate pretzels at Edelweiss Chocolates, a venerable Beverly Hills store that was reportedly one of the few things Katharine Hepburn missed about Hollywood, are pretty good, especially if you get the ones enrobed in dark chocolate. (You were going to get the dark-chocolate ones, weren’t you?) And if you go to the Santa Monica outlet of the chocolatier, in the Brentwood Country Mart, you can walk a few steps down and indulge in another New York pretzel obsession: City Bakery’s famous pretzel croissants, salty, tawny, buttery objects that have unaccountably been improved by a brief bath in lye. 444 N. Canon Dr., Beverly Hills, (310) 275-0341; 225 26th St., Suite 22, Santa Monica, (310) 656-0306.

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