Robert Would Have Been...

When I looked at my calendar today I thought "the 4th of March rings a bell!"Yes, it is Robert's birthday today. I'd like to reach out and say hello. Let's raise our glasses and toast Robert on his birthday.

Remembering Robert

Sharing happy memories of Robert with you on this day,
Rennea

A Toast! March 4, 2010

A toast in gratitude
for a great friend
on his birthday.

from Angelina

this picture in on display at the gift shop at Scharffen Berger

I visited Robert's blog a week ago or so after it was featured as Blogger's Blog of the Week. I was touched by the various posts celebrating your friend's life, and I was actually moved to tears. I had almost forgotten about reading the blog when, just tonight, I saw a Scharffen Berger chocolate bar in the checkout line at Trader Joe's in downtown Washington, D.C. I figured I must try the chocolate bar I'd read about on the blog, and I'm certainly glad I did--what a delicious piece of chocolate.

from Rennea

Renie Joie taped it with Jamie's camera (I think)
I added the subtitles in case the sound doesn't come out well.
Voilá Roberre, here is a song for you: Oye Roberto

from Theresa

Nancy Steinberg, Robert's sister, thanking all the volunteers and people who donated goods and services for the celebration


Hi Alice,

Yes, it was a wonderful event. I enjoyed hearing all the stories and reconnecting with old friends. I'm sorry I wasn't able to stay to help with the clean up! Here's a link to some of the photos I took. Please feel free to share.

Cheers,
Theresa
Celebrate Robert

more from Susie

Here is a link to Susie's set of pictures
of Robert's Celebration on November 9th, 2008
Robert Steinberg Memorial

from Susie

This week Robert Steinberg, one of the forces behind ScharffenBerger Chocolate Maker, passed away after many years of fighting cancer.

I’m happy to have known this brilliant, passionate man who started as a doctor then dedicated his life to creating a high quality dark chocolate as well as educating the palates of many. I tell people Scharffen Berger was the first great American dark chocolate. (Remember when Special Dark was the only American dark chocolate?)

I remember the the thrill of first hearing about Scharffen Berger, in a long profile in the San Francisco Chronicle, when the company was in its original location.

copied by permission from Susie's blog nuttyfig.com

Then when volunteering for Transfair USA on Fair Trade chocolate, in 2001, we were giddy about being able to visit Robert at the new factory in Berkeley. I’d never met someone like Robert, with such fervor and deep scientific knowledge of cacao beans (back before the word “cacao” emblazoned the labels of every high end chocolate bar).

We learned the company was already paying its suppliers a price higher than required for Fair Trade certification. Their main concern was getting the best quality beans possible and educating more cacao growers on how to process their beans for quality.

Most memorably, he wanted us to truly understand the difference in chocolate flavor (mainly Fair Trade vs not). We held a chocolate taste test along with chocolate luminary Alice Medrich, attributed with introducing the chocolate truffle to America many years ago.

When I went to Paris, Robert gave me some bars to take the picture above (which now so au courant, with the Jeff Koonz show at Versailles.) After hearing he learned to make chocolate at Bernachon in France, I took a side trip through Lyon to see what Bernachon was all about. I decided I liked Scharffen Berger chocolate better.

Fair Trade chocolate has come a long way in just a few years, as has Scharffen Berger chocolate. Now you’ll find it in many stores thanks to their acquisition by Hershey. I imagine Robert was proud to have influenced the quality of Hershey as well as other large chocolate brands.

Knowing Robert has left this world is bittersweet but I’m sure he’s enjoying the great chocolate factory in the sky. Learn more about Robert on the Scharffen Berger website.

copied from Susie Wyshak's blog: nuttyfig.com

from Deborah

An Appreciation of Robert Steinberg



I first met Robert in April 1997. Agnes Lord told me about her friend Dr. Robert Steinberg who was starting a chocolate company with John Scharffenberger. She said they were looking for a public relations consultant and she’d recommended me. Robert brought a sample of his chocolate for me to taste. It was an early batch of the bittersweet 70% and was unlike any chocolate I’d had at that point – bold, fruity, and memorable. We talked of his life journey and why he and John started the company. The meeting must have gone well because I was asked to meet with John and was subsequently hired. The next several years were enormously exciting, rewarding and fun for me. I know that in the beginning, Robert had his doubts about PR and my methods, especially when he had to be convinced to pose with John buried up to their necks in cocoa beans for a magazine shoot! He came around though.



Long after I stopped working with Scharffen Berger, Robert always found the time to call me whether it was to gripe about a poorly researched article about chocolate, a book he was reading, who he was dating, his physical state, an under-the-radar restaurant find, or a new batch of cocoa beans that had come in. I was thrilled that he was feeling so healthy for most of 2008. He was traveling a lot and we only saw each other in passing – at the Orson opening, outside Bi-Rite Market where he purchased pickled herring regularly and at the Golden Glass event at Fort Mason in July where I bumped into him in a typical Robert pose - wine glass in one hand and head angled to one side while surveying the crowd with quizzical amusement.



I miss him enormously – his kindness, warmth, occasional rants and his sheer passion for life. I have been holding onto my last two limited edition bars – Porcelana and Jamaica à l’ancienne, but finally feel ready to open them up.



Robert, thank you so much for your friendship and your impact on my life which continues to grow as I meet the people who were so important to you.



Deborah Kwan

How to get to St. Georges Spirits - Robert's Celebration

These are really good directions
DIRECTIONS
Our address is 2601 Monarch Street,
Alameda, CA 94501. Our phone number is
(510) 769-1601.

From San Francisco:
Go across the Bay Bridge and stay in right
lanes for 880-S to San Jose and Alameda.
Take the Broadway/Alameda exit and turn
right at the signal onto 5th. Stay in right lane
to Alameda. After the third light, angle left
into the Alameda tube. Follow Alameda
directions below.

From Berkeley and the North:
On 80-W stay in left of center lanes at the
MacArthur maze to San Jose and Alameda to 880 S. Take the Broadway/Alameda exit and turn right at the
signal onto 5th. Stay in left lane to Broadway and angle left to the Alameda tube. Follow Alameda
directions below.

From the East (Concord, etc.):
Take 24 to Oakland (980). Take 12th Street Exit straight ahead to 5th Street (just past 880 overpass). Turn left
(stay in one of the left two lanes), continue through the tube to Alameda. Follow Alameda directions below.

From the South Bay:
Go North on 880 to Broadway exit (downtown Oakland). Turn right on Broadway, then right again
immediately at the first light onto 7th street. Straight ahead two blocks to Webster Street. Turn right on Webster
into Alameda tube. Follow Alameda directions below.

From Alameda:
As you exit the Webster tube the road forks, stay in the middle. Turn right at the first signal onto
Atlantic. Follow Atlantic almost two miles until just before the entrance to Alameda Point. (the Naval
Air Station) Turn right on Main St. and continue until you arrive at the North Entrance of the Naval
Base. Go through the gates, veer right, then make the first righthand
turn onto W Red Line Avenue.
Red Line dead ends on Monarch Street; turn left onto Monarch. St George is the second Hangar on
your right. The entrance to the tasting room and retail space is on the west side of the Hangar.

and here to print the map/directions in Alameda.
MAP

from Raul

Hello everyone,

I just wanted to share with you a picture of the Altar we made in the name of Robert and Alta's brother in la Hacienda.
I tried to find doctors made out of chocolate, but could not. I think he visited us. He turned over one of the vases and ate some chocolate!

big kiss.
rc

Robert's Life Celebration

We are celebrationg Robert's life on November 9th, 2008.
Save the date and join us from 3 to 6pm at St. George Spirits.
We will be sharing stories, pictures and some delicious food.
We are asking everyone that is planning to come to please RSVP
in the following EVITE
Looking forward to seeing you there!

from Jed

I will never forget Robert's friendship with my parents and presence at our house in Ukiah. Picking raspberries in his back yard and watching Robert acting at the Ukiah Play House are some of my earliest childhood memories. I will forever be in debt to Robert for his help in reviewing my application for medical school. I am lucky to have known Robert, and saddened that my parents have lost one of their closest friends.

Jed Katzel

from Nigel, Pilou and Juliette

A photo of Robert in Aix taken last year.


Rennea, We are slowly getting to grips with the fact that we have lost a wonderful friend. I can still remember that wonderful evening at my flat on Piazza Santo Stefano in 1990 where we all started to get to know each other. Pilou and I had just met. Over the years, we have met up with Robert most years somewhere or another and I have such great memories of long lunches and evenings spent around a table. I could always pour my heart out to Robert, he was a great listener and a very wise counselor. What a great piece of life he had over the last 20 years despite the knowledge of his illness. Few could handle that with such calm combined with optimism and enthusiasm. Last year we joined up on our boat in Marblehead and in Maine for a few days and again in Aix en Provence in October.

We are so sorry that we can’t be there for the celebration but it is difficult with Juliette and a long way to come. We will be with you in heart and spirit.

Nigel
-
-

from Anni and Jarion

Sheer indulgence - Anni and Robert at the 2002 Whiskey Expo at the Nikko Hotel in San Francisco



Single malt Scotch whiskey and Sharffen Berger chocolate together? Jarion is in Heaven with his dear friend!

In loving tribute to Robert

Robert Steinberg: a dear friend, a great inspiration.

Jarion has known Robert since the 1970s, when he had the rare experience of sharing the stage with Robert at the Ukiah Playhouse in "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead." I met Robert after Jarion and I married in 1989, and I remember sadly digesting the news of his lymphoma diagnosis, and visiting him in his San Francisco medical office just before he sold the practice.

Sure, I remember his apartment and the roof view and the kitchen remodeling project, and the great cooking tips he shared, and the fine meals and deep discussions there and at our house in Mill Valley. But most of my memories of Robert come from his post diagnosis chocolate fervor. He met us for lunch in downtown Mill Valley one day and said "don't order dessert," whereupon he produced two foil wrapped packets from his pocket. He said he had been "experimenting" in his kitchen, and offered up a smooth slab of homemade conched chocolate, with a complex, intense flavor that made our eyes grow wide with pleasure. The contents of the second packet looked more like something regurgitated by one's pet, brown and lumpy with bits of cocoa nibs in crunchy evidence. However, upon savoring it, Jarion, a fellow fine chocolate lover, immediately pronounced that it should be a commercially available confection - as is. Much to our delight, a few years later and with some refinement, the Nibby Bar was born.

Jarion loved to visit the first Sharffen Berger factory in South San Francisco, because Robert gave him bags of cocoa bean hulls to use as garden mulch. He would empty those big burlap bags around the garden and when the sun warmed up the hulls, our entire property would be wrapped in the warm aroma of chocolate.

Robert designed the cake for Jarion's 50th birthday party in January of 1998, and brought it to the event along with the final decorations, big flat shards of chocolate and bits of edible gold leaf. He later took the microphone onstage to roast Jarion up a bit, lovingly tweaking the youthful narcissim of his actor buddy. The 100 or so guests were thrilled to discover Scharffen Berger chocolate that night, and many fans were born.

We also tried a bit of matchmaking at times, but Robert did just fine in his relationships with women without our efforts. With his intelligence and wit, his humor and energy and his great heart, why not?

So many times when our calls were not returned, or our messages were unanswered in the past few years, we thought... is this it? Is Robert in the hospital, has he succumbed to the cancer, is he unable to communicate with us? And then a flood of joy and relief would follow when he finally called back, or showed up at one of Jarion's performances, with a quick update on his latest brush with mortality, but as he had many times before, he had once again bounced back. He once called from a hospital in Boston during a medical struggle, once from an airport in Miami after his latest treatment had worked so well he was off to an international conference. He sometimes rested and recuperated - but he usually jumped right back into the fray as soon as he was barely on his feet again.

These fond photos are from the Whisky Expo at the Nikko Hotel in March of 2002. Jarion is passionate about single malt whiskey AND chocolate, so when we found out Robert would be there representing Scharffen Berger, we were delighted! Robert left his table with its huge pile of chocolate pieces chopped up on a giant slab of a cutting board, to wander around with us, sampling the food and information and history, (while Jarion and I sampled a LOT of whiskey).

Passion and commitment fueled the final years of Robert's rich life, and is a lesson to all of us to care deeply, live vigorously, and love wholeheartedly. We will miss you greatly Robert,

Anni Long and Jarion Monroe

to Robert

Robert,

The beautiful thing about having lots of friends

is that there is a little bit of you in each of them.

Each has a story to tell and a warm thought to share.

I wonder what do you think when you read this blog.

Rennea
-

from Ed Rudolph

photo of Robert and Jamie, 2005. A close examination shows that in his bag Robert is carrying a newly-purchased book called "Seeking the Heart of Wisdom."


Robert had an extraordinary number of friends when he died, a wide variety of interesting people, many of whom loved him. Somehow, as he grew older he became more of a mensch. The scope of his friendships and connections shows what an extraordinary guy he was.

In 1974, Robert and my cousins Judy and George all worked at the then Pacific Medical Center in the Fillmore district in San Francisco. I first met Robert the afternoon he and I, among others, were helping Judy and George move their furniture from an apartment on Clay Street across from Alta Plaza Park into another apartment on top of a small shingled building on Buchanan Street. He and I and others were carrying a large but reasonably light couch up the stairs. Judy had introduced him to me as “Row-bare,” the French pronunciation and, in fact, he wore a beret. Even now, half the time I call him “Row-bare” and the other half “Rah’-bert.” That day we all managed to wedge the couch firmly into the last doorway it had to go through. Beyond that door, Judy and George’s new narrow staircase made a right turn from the direction of the hallway. The couch was not going to make it up those stairs; it would retreat back out of the building and go somewhere else. After it had gotten wedged there and we had all been wrestling with it for a while, Robert said, “I’m sorry, I have to leave. I have to go swimming.”

That was the day I met him. He did so many things in the following years that I can’t remember the exact chronology. After his internship, he entered a psychiatric residency at Yale but didn’t like it; he moved back to the Sunset District of San Francisco and completed a Family Practice residency at SF General. He and I roomed together for a year or more in a flat with fantastic views on Potrero Hill, a neighborhood that was then somehow separated from the rest of the city. To give you an idea of how long ago this was, our rent then was $450 and that flat now rents for $4800. At some point he moved to Manhattan with the thought of becoming an actor - we drove together from SF to NYC hauling a trailer with some of his furniture in it. After a year or more, he returned to California and lived and practice medicine in Ukiah, California. Then he seemed to settle down in San Francisco, although it seems wrong to say that Robert could settle down, and in 1986 he and I and Jamie Putnam (now my wife) together bought a house around the corner from that flat he and I had lived in. He lived in the upstairs flat, we downstairs. He started a medical practice as a family physician in the West Portal area. A couple of years after we’d moved in, he was diagnosed with lymphoma.

His diagnosis began the period you might call “the rest of his life.” He decided to close his practice and, these are my words not his, devote himself to his life. What is unusual is how broad his life became. He lived alone but always sought others. During the next twenty years he was often away traveling, punctuated by periods of dealing with his illness. When he went into the chocolate business his schedule became even more hectic. Amazingly so. I don’t know how he did it. The longer he lived with his illness, the more he accomplished.

I’ve noticed that some people, as they grow older, stop making friends. Getting old leaves them with fewer and fewer of them. But Robert every year seemed to have more and more and more friends. To me, this is a sign of how extremely, outstandingly healthy he was to the day he died.

from Leslie Krebs

Robert at Chocolate Concerto after his talk, Chapel of the Chimes, Oakland, CA


I will miss my old friend, Robert Steinberg, very much.

I met Robert in the early 1960s, when we were in first-year French class at Marblehead Junior High School in Massachusetts. Our teacher was the indomitable Helen C. Bagley, whose French was so guttural she used to spray the front row of students with her spit. We said someday we'd all "go to hell n' see Bagley."



In high school, we called Robert "Stein" and "Bob," two names he did away with later, just as he did away with his terrific Cyrano de Bergerac nose. Tracked in classes with Robert year after year, I was drawn to his quiet intelligence, thoughtful demeanor, gentle charm and expressive green eyes. I didn't mind his occasional outbursts, when he would blurt out a pointed one-liner about something that was annoying him. As he himself once observed, "We sometimes play against our own best image."



Robert could be so kind. On one visit, he travelled all the way to El Salvador to see me in the 1970s, when I was having a rough time in a bad marriage with a baby in tow. Robert's presence spread a kind of balm over the scene and reminded me that there were some very good men in the world, and that it didn't have to be my fate always to suffer with a bad one.



(Was this the Latin American trip where Robert wound up trapped by flooding in a Bolivian town inhabited by Nazis in hiding? I wish I could call him up right now so he could tell me that story again.)



Robert was a good doctor, but he did not seem happy in a profession he had chosen out of caution, not love. So it was one of those bittersweet ironies of life, noted by other admirers online, that Robert's diagnosis gave him a reason to throw caution to the winds. Who could have known, back in junior high, that chocolate would give full play to Robert's creativity and single-minded pursuit of excellence? Or that his chocolate would rival the best in France?



Helen C. Bagley would have been proud, and she would have taken credit.



One of the things I liked best about Robert was how intently he would listen to you and value the way you put things. It made you think about what you were saying because suddenly it was very important. On one visit to San Francisco, after Robert had been through another one of those close calls with lymphoma, I said to him, "This illness is just so … so … so … (Robert was waiting) inconvenient!" "YES!" he fairly shouted. And I was relieved I had found the right word.



In recent years, Robert gave a talk at the Museum of Natural History here in Santa Barbara, arranged by a friend of mine who worked there. It was supposed to be an event for special donors, but the local newspaper mistakenly reported that it was open to the public. The frazzled museum staff had to turn away hundreds of angry people who called and showed up at the door, clamoring to be allowed in. When the lucky audience finally settled down, Robert gave a science lesson to equal any we got in high school and soon had people swooning over bits of cacao and dark chocolate.



The paper ran a story entitled, "Sweet Talker," which Robert sent to his mom. He didn't like the headline, but it was true there was real sweetness in him. I used to worry that he was not married. Some years back, after he had let yet another good woman slip away, I said, "But who will take care of you?" And he said, "I have WONDERFUL friends here in San Francisco."



Making great chocolate may have been Robert's métier, but his friends — all of you who cooked and dined and drank with him and and talked philosophy and baseball with him — you were the spice of his life.



— Leslie Krebs

from Beth

I had the good fortune of meeting Robert right when he was honing his chocolate recipes and easing into his new career. I don't remember how it came up but we soon discovered our common judaism and on occasion over the years we would share an impromptu Passover sedar at Baker Beach or a more extended one at his home. Robert was always like family to me: loving, supportive and totally straight-up with his opinions. It goes without saying that he will be missed by so many of us. Through this blog, I've been moved to see just how many people Robert touched. He was a wonderful man and I miss him terribly.

from Gerry

Pictures taken in Boston just this past August.

They were taken at his mother's birthday party on Aug 17th, his mother's 90th. Robert is with his cousin Gerry Levinson in the first. The group shot is with Nancy, his mother Selma, and his uncle Melvin Levinson (Gerry's father)

Ann and Gerry Levinson