REAL LIFE HUMOR

An Open Letter from a Crack Bar Addict

Help! I could really use a pick-me-up

Dear Reader,

Please don’t judge me. I can’t help myself. I tried them once and I was hooked. That was it for me. I had found my own little piece of heaven.

My love affair started one fateful day back in 2018.

I was walking down the street in New York with my daughter, and we were exhausted. She was 12 at the time and we had been shopping in every Brandi Melville she could find.

As the day wound down, we stumbled past New York’s Art Institute and I decided, I needed a quick pick-me-up.

That’s when I discovered crack bars.

My life changed that day. I know, I can feel you judging me again. But those crack bars made me happy. They brought me to my special place. My daughter tried them too. She, unfortunately, wasn’t a fan.

Now before you go searching for my number online to call child protective services, know this…

The crack bars I found in New York City were only made with high quality stuff. They were locally sourced, and you could buy cut and uncut quantities-depending on what was available.

Oh, and they were delicious.

Wait- you knew that I was talking about food, right?

Perhaps you have had a crack bar in your life? You’ve experienced the sweet combination of cocoa and coconut?

As a person suffering from fibromyalgia, I sadly had not.

Four years ago, after being diagnosed, I had to cut out all processed foods, dairy, gluten, soy, canola oil and refined sugars. Oh, and lest I forget, alcohol and caffeine too.

Yes, if diet was a religion-I would be Catholic. I am abstaining in this life, in hopes of a better tomorrow.

This was not an easy transition. Butter, bread and chocolate are my three favorite food groups. And sadly, they were all taken away.

Now, I have never been a big foodie. But they say absence makes the heart grow fonder. Apparently, absence also makes the stomach feel emptier and your food taste like cardboard.

But over time you grow to like cardboard. In fact, you start to find cardboard downright delicious.

That is until you stumble across crack bars. And not just any crack bars. What I’m really talking about are the crack bars from New York’s very own Hu Kitchen.

Hu Kitchen

Hu Kitchen, I found out, was short for Human Kitchen. This bustling café in Greenwich Village, New York looked like a school canteen but served up a wide range of delicious food that was organic, gluten-free, dairy-free, and soy-free. It had a range of home-cooked meals that would make your mouth water.

The restaurant and brand came about in 2011.

It was the bi-product of co-founder Jason Brown’s research into the gut-mind connection and the impact of certain foods and additives on inflammation following his battle with an auto-immune disease.

On the surface, Hu Kitchen was not the typical stomping ground for up-and-coming food connoisseurs. Not even close. And if you were to judge it by the non-descript décor, you might never have set foot in the place.

But it provided such good, clean home-style cooking. And it was a rare gem for people like me.

What’s more, the crack bars were out of this world.

Let Me Tell You About Crack Bars

To give you a proverbial taste of what I am talking about, here is a list of ingredients found in Hu crack bars. Yes, they include chocolate, but it’s their own brand of chocolate which just happens to be gluten-free, non-GMO, cane sugar-free, refined sugar-free, soy-free, dairy-free and free of all lecithins and gums. Essentially it is full of 99.99% goodness.

Hu Crack Bars-Hu Chocolate, organic shredded coconut, organic coconut flour, organic coconut oil, organic coconut milk, house-made almond butter, unfiltered raw honey, organic vanilla bean. NO cane sugar, NO refined sugar, NO palm oil, NO soy lecithin, NO dairy, NO sugar alcohols

For those of you familiar with Hu’s crack bars or who have a hankering to make their own crack bars at home, be sure to check out Rachel Mansfield’s sea-salt, dark chocolate gluten-free, grain-free and dairy-free recipe online.

Apparently, these bars are pretty darn close to my coveted Hu bars.

A Tragic End

Hu crack bars pushed me over the edge. I fell hook, line and sinker for these sweet gooey treats. I became a certified crack bar addict almost instantly. This could have ended very badly for me. Crack bars could have been my undoing.

But tragically, my beloved Hu Kitchen shuttered its doors this past October— another casualty of our ongoing COVID crisis. And while they still sell many products online, my crack bars are nowhere to be found.

Sadly, it feels as though a little bit of heaven has been ripped out of my life. And that is a tragedy.

RIP my beloved crack bars. You will always have a place in my heart and my stomach.

****

Covid-19 is claiming so many of our beloved restaurants. Please be sure to support your local eateries so you don’t lose your favorite spot too.

Yours truly,

The Crack Bar Addict