Reno Food & Drink Week is in full swing. It's a chance to highlight some of the local businesses in our restaurant community. Dorinda's Chocolates has been part of it since the beginning. They have retail shops in Truckee and Reno and have been creating handmade confections for nearly a decade and a half. It's always been a family affair.

"My mom Dorinda and I started out in Truckee, California, and for me originally it was just a high school job," said Dorinda's CEO Dustin Vance. "Then the more and more I started working and falling in love with chocolate the more and more it evolved. We've been in Reno for about ten years now. My brother and I started Rolled Mountain Creamery, the ice cream side of things, about six years ago. So I guess you can say we've been a sweet family for a long time now."

All of the sweets are made at the company's production facility on Wells Avenue in Reno, using only the finest ingredients.

"We use Valrhona chocolate, which comes from France, in my opinion it's some of the best chocolate in the world," Vance said.

What they don't use is any preservatives, so the chocolatiers here are working constantly to keep the shelves filled at Dorinda's three locations.

"I've been classically trained I've trained with masters in New York, doing chocolate sculptures and chocolate everything," Vance said. "It's a very unique niche, and a very small group of people who are trained chocolatiers. What I take pride in, especially with the chocolate we have to offer, is it's real chocolate for real people. Meaning, it's not all super shiny stuff, we don't do crazy flavors like lavender because I think lavender tastes like soap. We create delicious pieces with nuts and caramels and things you want to go back and eat time and time again."

He credits the local community for keeping things going, especially the support they saw during the pandemic.

"We love Reno, we wouldn't be here if it wasn't for this community," Vance said. "Especially with COVID. I know when everybody was shutting down, we were one of those nonessential businesses and I had to let all my people go. What kept us alive is people were ordering off the website, and I had nothing better to do, me and my wife, so we were hand-delivering these boxes of chocolate here in the Reno area. And as soon as the community figured out they could order off their website and it would be delivered by the owner in 15 minutes, people went nuts. And so people continued to order and it's like whoa, all the sudden I had to hire staff back to make more inventory and get the ball rolling again, which was huge for us. Without this community we wouldn't be here, so we try to give back as much as possible."

Right now preparations for Father's Day are in full swing..

"If you're like my dad, you love chocolate," Vance said. "And we've created the dad box - kind of like the dad bod - and what's in the dad box is a bunch of caramels and nuts and things dad is totally going to love. So if you don't know what to do for Father's Day, they always love chocolate and if they don't like it, you can eat it yourself."

Reno Food & Drink Week runs through June 16.

More information: https://hungryinreno.com/2023rfdw/