Li-Lac Chocolates

Li-Lac has been making chocolate in Manhattan since 1923 — it bills itself, with justification, as the city's oldest chocolate house — and its West Village shop keeps the operation where it began a century ago. The cases hold the classics the store has sold for generations: hand-made fudge, butter crunch, and the house specialty of chocolate cast in Manhattan shapes, from taxis and brownstones to a solid chocolate Empire State Building that makes a better souvenir than anything in midtown.

The shop moved along the Village a few times over its century — Christopher Street for decades, then Eighth Avenue, now this bright corner-ish storefront on Greenwich Avenue — but the recipes travel intact, many unchanged from founder George Demetrious's originals. It's a small room, quick to visit, and the kind of place where a few dollars buys a piece of continuous New York history you can eat on the walk to Gay Street.

Around Valentine's Day and the winter holidays the line goes out the door; the rest of the year it's simply the neighborhood's chocolate shop, which is the best thing a century-old business can be.