SC has the best chocolate shop in the nation for 2025, USA Today says. Here’s where
Elizabeth Logan McDaniel is so committed to making the best chocolate, she keeps a notepad by her bed to remember recipes she dreams about.
Not only that but she thinks about any recipe for months before she actually makes it.
She’s been in the chocolate making business for 10 years and her LaRue Fine Chocolate was just named the best Chocolate shop in the United States by USA Today 10 best.
“It feels a little surreal,” she said in a news release from the city of Greenville. “This is a culmination of my team’s hard work.”
McDaniel was raised in Easley, attended Lander University and was a fine wine sales representative for more than a decade. She says on her website making chocolates was a hobby before she decided it should be more. She graduated from the Ecole Chocolat, an online program based in San Francisco
In 2015, she started LaRue Fine Chocolate, named after her mother, Dora LaRue Smith Logan, who died in 1996.
“She hated her name, but I always thought it sounded like she should have been painted on the side of a B-17,” McDaniel said. “My Momma was a badass ... she served in the Army ... she raised four boys and then gave birth to me at the age of 40. She was strong, kind, gentle, and full of love — not to mention one hell of a Scrabble player.”
McDaniel sold chocolate truffles at the TD Saturday Market on Main Street for five years before opening a store on Perry Avenue in West Greenville that sells cocktails, small plates, coffee and non-alcoholic drinks, desserts and a wine and beer selection.
Her second store is at The Commons at Unity Park, opened last July 2024 with soft-serve ice cream, scoop ice creams, cookies, cupcakes, ice cream sandwiches and slushies.
The chocolates have names, like The Dora LaRue, peanut butter, graham cracker crunch in milk chocolate and GrandMa, milk chocolate, Grand Marnier ganache in milk chocolate with candied orange zest.
Her goal — thrill the customers and exceed their expectations.
The other shops on USA Today’s list are Vesta Chocolate in Montclair, New Jersey; Garcia Nevett Chocolatier de Miami, Miami, Florida; Piety and Desire Chocolate in New Orleans, Louisiana; Saratoga Chocolate Co in Saratoga Springs, New York; Bedré Fine Chocolate, Davis, Oklahoma; The Xocolate Bar, Berkeley, California; Videri Chocolate Factory, Raleigh, North Carolina; Cacao & Cardamom Chocolatier in Houston, Texas and Pizzelle’s Confections in Huntsville, Alabama.