Sweet Success

First, there’s her store. She originally called it Maribel, but after discovering that that name already had been registered, she changed it to the French-sounding MarieBelle – not a bad thing, particularly if you’re a chocolatier. However, a look inside reveals a bit more about the person behind the name; there are chocolates flavored with Spanish saffron, Indian cardamom, Caribbean passion fruit, Mexican chipotle, Mideastern marzipan – all imprinted with unique silk-screen designs to tell them apart.

“I want everybody to have their own personality,” Lieberman, 44, says of her chocolates. “That’s what I like about it.”
Then there’s the woman herself. There’s the Honduran Maribel that her Hispanic clientele has come to know. There’s the Maribel who, via her last name - which came by way of her husband, Jacques Lieberman - gets frequent calls from Jewish community members. And there’s the Maribel who has taken her Catholic background, mixed it with her husband’s life growing up Jewish in Belgium, France and Israel and applied it all to life in the biggest city in America.

At their Manhattan home, she and her husband of 16 years teach their year-old daughter, Angelina, about both Christian and Jewish holidays. Maribel often speaks to their daughter in Spanish, and Jacques in French. At work, Maribel has surrounded herself with family – her sister as a kitchen chef, and extended family members in retail and other parts of the business. Her husband, an artist, has a gallery of his work next door to her shop. In her spare time, she is involved with Innocence in Danger, a Switzerland-based group that helps sexually abused children and has begun expansion to the United States.

We all feel that we are very special, that our food is the best,” Lieberman says of her cooking philosophy. “I come from Honduras, I know this dish is the best, but not necessarily somebody from France is going to think that way. I think mixing flavors and mixing all these ingredients makes the other person feel familiar with what they’re eating. Let’s say if I make a traditional Honduran dish and I put a French sauce added to it, already you are entering the world of that French person.”

Although she had studied English in New York in 1979, Lieberman didn’t move to America permanently until 1985, settling in New Orleans. She relocated to New York in 1988, first studying architecture, then fashion design before deciding she wanted to be a chef. In 1995 she started a catering business, later opening a storefront called Lunettes et Chocolate in the Nolita (North of Little Italy) section of Manhattan to promote the venture. Although her designer chocolates were meant as a way to introduce people to the larger catering business, they eventually became the focus, leading her to devote her time exclusively to chocolate in 2000.

But with business slow just after the September 11 terrorist attacks, she tried something new: Taking over a Soho storefront from one of the many shops forced to close after the attacks, she began passing out samples of her Aztec hot chocolate. People started talking about it, and favorable published reviews helped further awareness, so much so that she later closed Lunettes et Chocolate. MarieBelle chocolates are now sold in Neiman Marcus, Williams-Sonoma, Dean & Deluca, Bergdorf Goodman, Harrods department store in London, Le Bon Marche stores in Paris and Takashimaya stores in Japan.

“I really do enjoy the happiness people feel when they come to my store, when they taste the chocolate,” Lieberman says. “This to me is rewarding. That’s why I think that we should always see what we like when we’re little, and then this is what we should consider becoming when we grow up.”

The front two-thirds of the shop are where Lieberman sells her chocolates, in various boxes and in individual pieces under a glass case along one wall. In the back of the shop is her Cacao Bar where patrons can sit and drink their hot chocolate or tea.

Hanging on a wall near the entry to the Cacao Bar are the original larger designs found on her chocolates. These are scanned into a computer and shrunk down to 1-inch squares. They’re then sent to France, where they’re silk-screened using food coloring and cocoa butter. The designs are transferred to large sheets and sent back to New York, where they’re pressed on to the chocolate squares. The shop churns out 8,000 to 10,000 chocolates a day.

And as she once told a class of high schoolers, if you’re unsure about what career to choose, just remember what you enjoyed as a child.