Our Story
Named for the people who first made chocolate.
A family-owned shop on Wealthy Street since 2016, working in a lineage that goes back thousands of years.
The name
A word for the earliest chocolate makers
Mokaya is named for an ancient Mesoamerican people, recognized as among the earliest to make a drink from cacao and carry chocolate across the Americas. The shop’s sun-mark is copied from imagery found on archaeological bowls that once held traces of that first chocolate.
It is not just decoration. Max, who runs the shop day to day, studied anthropology, and the Mesoamerican origin of cacao is the idea the whole shop is built around. Everyone deserves good chocolate.
“Chocolate is a remarkable medium to create edible art.”
The makers
A family shop
Founder & Chocolatier
Charles “Smitty” Golczynski
Charles ran Jersey Junction and then The Catering Company for about twenty years before selling it to open Mokaya. He learned confectionery from colleagues at the Culinary Institute of Michigan and trained under pastry chef and chocolatier Luis Amado. Colored cocoa butters, and a friendship with a Mexican chocolatier, became the shop’s signature.
General Manager
Max Golczynski
Charles’s son, Max grew up in his father’s kitchens and studied anthropology in college. He runs the shop day to day, and it is his field of study that ties Mokaya’s bonbons back to the Mesoamerican people the shop is named for. Family-owned since 2016.
Tree-to-Bar
You can taste the canopy forest
Charles partnered with Efren Elvir Maradiaga, owner of the Honduras-based chocolatier Atúcun, to make single-origin chocolate from Honduran cacao, an ancestral home of cacao that predates the Maya. It is made tree-to-bar, from the bean to the finished chocolate.
“When I bite into it, I can taste things I cannot taste in other chocolates. Wonderful earthy mushroom tones. You can taste the canopy forest.”
What we stand for