Chocolate Nation - Sue Purkiss

 Belgium is well-known for a number of things: beautiful old cities, waffles, moules et frites, the European Commission, Tintin - and, of course, chocolate. So when earlier this week my grandson Casper suggested visiting a chocolate museum in Antwerp (my son and his family live in Brussels, and I was visiting them), I certainly wasn't going to say no.

We went by train to Antwerp - whose station, incidentally, is quite incredible: immensely tall, with a beautifully decorated ceiling and an extraordinarily ornate clock. The museum, which is only a few years old, is just a couple of minutes'walk from the station, and if you're a chocolate lover, it's a must. (If you're not, then probably best stay away.)

It's an extraordinary piece of design and technology. You're only allowed in a very few people at a time: the doors to each of the first four rooms open to let you in, then swing closed behind you. And these four rooms take you on the journey of the cocoa pod, from the trees where it grows in South America to its eventual transformation in Belgium into delicious chocolate. The whole experience is really clever: light and sound and heaven knows what else combine to show you each stage of the process. It's beautiful, but it's also very informative: you learn without realising you're learning. 

After these four rooms, you go first into a sort of virtual restaurant, where you sit down in front of a plate and watch as tiny people zoom around in front of you - to be honest, I'm not quite sure what they were doing, but it was all very pretty and entertaining.

And then you go into a room with a slightly more conventional layout, where you learn about the history of chocolate making in Belgium, and the people involved. I was intigued to learn about Guylian - those chocolate seashells that are in every supermarket. They were developed in 1958, by a young couple named Guy and Liliane. Guy was a passionate chocolate maker. He spotted a gap in the market. Chocolate tended to be more of a winter thing - but what if you could create something that evoked summer? On holiday at the Belgian seaside, the couple hit on the idea of creating chocolate seashells filled with praline. Guy's responsibility was creating the chocolate and praline, and Liliane's job was the all-important design. Guylian was born, and now their chocolates are sold all over the world.

Innovation continues. A few years ago, someone discovered that if you combined certain types of cocoa beans, the chocolate that emerged was pink, with a taste that's creamy, but also fruity - and completely natural.

By this time, I was beginning to wonder if we were going to get to actually taste some of this deliciousness. The next room concerned the people who actually grow the trees and harvest the pods, and the initiatives which have been created to help them succeed and imrove their conditions and outcomes. Then, passing this beautiful castle, made entirely, of course, out of chocolate, we finally came to the tasting room, where we judiciously sampled around ten different strengths of liquid chocolate - "Hm, not sure whether I prefer this one or the one back at the beginning - maybe better have another taste, just to be sure..."

And of course, there was a shop.

It's a fascinating museum - not just because of the pervading chocolatiness, but also because of the innovative ways in which it tells its stories. Very well worth a visit - and Antwerp too is lovely, though we only had time for a quick hike round to the old town and the river.