And the Max Brenner restaurants in Manhattan have often been packed, an affirmation of a strategy that strikes me as both novel and shrewd. It’s been saluted in People magazine and featured on cable television news broadcasts. But there’s no ready clue that Max Brenner is now owned by an Israeli food corporation, which has succeeded in establishing it in Singapore, the Philippines, Australia and the United States. Brenner indeed happens to be bald, so there’s some follicular truth in the advertising. They’re called Max Brenner, Chocolate by the Bald Man, and belong to a chain spawned in Israel by a pair of businessmen, Max Fichtman and Oded Brenner, who conflated their two names into that of one quasi-fictive candy man. He’s a concept, Willy Wonka as hairless imperialist, and in the past year, Manhattan has welcomed not one but two chocolate-covered restaurants flying his banner. Max Brenner is well on his way to making that happen, and he doesn’t even exist. The streets would be paved with bonbons, the skyscrapers bricked with fudge. IF we’re not vigilant, who knows what could happen? We could wake up one dark chocolate morning to an East River of cocoa and a Hudson of hot fudge, slices of banana bobbing on its surface.
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