L.A.'s own Willy Wonka? The ‘father' of the Xbox is now perfecting lab-grown chocolate

Los Angeles Times

21-03-2025

There are technological and biological wonders inside the sleek San Gabriel offices of Seamus Blackley, which are evasively named — intentionally so — Pacific Light & Hologram.
Best known as the creator of Microsoft's Xbox video game console, Blackley can't talk about his latest computer work — he'll discuss it only under a 'Friend-D-A,' a playful twist on a nondisclosure agreement. But he can chat about the 1970s Dodge camper one sees when entering the building.
Complete with chalkboard-like scientific diagrams, the vehicle once belonged to Richard Feynman, the late Nobel Prize-winning Caltech physicist. Blackley has long been campaigning to get the camper into the Smithsonian.
And he can share details about the mechanical Acrocanthosaurus jaw that he and his team created for a television special. The model, which aimed to simulate the brute force of a dinosaur bite, sits just outside of Blackley's doorless personal office.
Consider the building a sort of living museum to Blackley's hobbies and interests.
Lately the space has been partially taken over by a makeshift greenhouse. Around a corner filled with complex tech equipment, a particular tree is likely to catch your eye. That's because the twisty, spindly room centerpiece with large, pointy, deep green leaves is no ordinary tree. Indeed, this tree doesn't naturally survive in the climate of Southern California. Blackley, however, wants dozens of them.
Blackley is growing cacao trees. And he says this latest obsession — Blackley went viral during the worst days of the pandemic for his dedication to baking bread with ancient, centuries-old Egyptian yeast — is serious. No mere diversion here; Blackley wants to create a Los Angeles chocolate company. But he's not talking about simply making chocolate bars as others in the bean-to-bar movement have done. He wants to go a step further.
Blackley desires a chocolate firm with cacao trees grown and cultivated right here in Southern California.
'Oh yes, we're going to have an L.A. chocolate company,' he says. 'We're going to see how far we can take it. I am serious about launching this as a standalone thing.'
The physicist and gaming entrepreneur isn't, of course, abandoning his day job for chocolate. Work will continue on projects Blackley isn't yet ready to reveal to the public.
Even so, there's no question Blackley won't answer. It's just that he may not do so directly. Expect a sense of humor. Visit, for instance, the website for Pacific Light & Hologram, and there's a hidden link that promises to take guests to the company's research via a white paper. Click it, however, and you will be Rickrolled. (A prospective employee was rejected when they claimed to have read the nonexistent study that leads to a video of Rick Astley's 'Never Gonna Give You Up.')
Physics and making chocolate, Blackley insists, is more related than one may think. Only Blackley's thesis doesn't involve deep, academic explanations of the culinary sciences. As someone whose midweek office wardrobe consists of shorts and a T-shirt, Blackley's theories are more conversational, casual and sometimes littered with words not fit for print.
'The scientific process is one where you have evidence-based feedback,' Blackley says. 'Even if you don't want to hear the evidence, you have to put it back in. That's why people get so angry about science. They don't want to know. But airplanes fly. Rockets go to planets. The reason for that is if you don't let your human bias and emotion get in the way, you can achieve magical things.
'Cooking is a great example of that,' he continues. 'There is no room for self-delusion. As every chef knows, it's the worst job in the world. There's zero BS. You're going to serve food to somebody, and they're going to tell you what they think with their wallet. Science and the culinary business are deeply related because it forces you to have no more BS. You can do the stuff we do during the day here and you can raise chocolate, if you remove yourself.'
And yet there's sincere personal passion behind the chocolate Blackley, 56, and partner Asher Sefami, 31, are creating in their climate-controlled lab, where LED lights give the trees their minimum 12 hours of sunlight. This is an insect-free zone, for instance, so Sefami must hand-pollinate the flowers that will lead to cacao pods.
Blackley's science background seeps into his specific chocolate-making approach, one in which he aims to 'get the hell out of the way' — no added cocoa butter or flavorings other than necessary sugar — to capture the taste of pure Los Angeles chocolate.
'We're going to be aiming at a different peak flavor than other people are because we have different organisms,' says Blackley, alluding to microbes in Los Angeles versus the equator-adjacent regions in which cacao is typically grown. 'That's exciting.'
And while the public can't tour Blackley's tech offices, if all goes according to plan he'll secure a proper chocolate-growing facility in the coming weeks or months, allowing him and Sefami to attempt to grow cacao trees at scale. L.A. will then have its own sort of Willy Wonka, a video game-loving, chocolate-obsessed magnate who never lost his inner child or compulsion for curiosity.
'People come and say, 'Oh, you saved my childhood,'' Blackley says, referencing his Xbox fame. 'And then other people come and say, 'My brother-in-law — his kid got shot by another kid for his Xbox.' I have no control over this. So Willy Wonka sounds awesome to me.'
Of course, it's early days for Blackley's chocolate factory. He and Sefami have been working toward this moment for about five years. Securing a cacao tree, it turns out, isn't all that difficult. Blackley found his first one on the auction site EBay. Then they had to learn what to do with it.
'I bought one from Florida, but it turned out to be fraudulent,' Blackley says. 'It wasn't cacao. Then I got one from Puerto Rico, which turned out to be real, and then I tried to order another one and EBay wouldn't let me buy it because of agricultural laws. So then I got the other two from Hawaii.'
Despite their availability online, don't think you can just do this at home.
The process has been a series of learning curves. As Blackley says, much of the literature about raising cacao trees and then fermenting cacao is geared toward doing so in outdoor tropical climates. An indoor facility in San Gabriel is not that. To actually grow their first cacao pod, the pair had to set up an environment that would mimic a half-day of lighting, construct an automatic watering system, keep the trees free of pests and then master the art of pollinating them. Sefami says that at first they didn't know cacao trees were not self-pollinating.
'I don't know what people do with them,' Blackley says of the cacao trees available for sale. 'It's so hard to set it up. I had some crazy ideas about how easy it would be to grow chocolate, and I was completely wrong. So I think most of these plants are just shipped to their death.'
The U.S., and even Los Angeles, is filled with beloved chocolate makers. The best often carefully source their cacao pods — an increasingly expensive endeavor — then roast and grind the beans into chocolate bars. Then there are chocolatiers, who specialize in unique chocolate confections, often created from high-end bars. They are two different crafts, neither of which fully appealed to Blackley and Sefami.
To understand, perhaps, why Blackley was so intent on securing chocolate from his own lab-grown trees, one must dig into his first love: video games. And then his desire to make them. Followed by his interest in creating the thing that plays them.
'It's really clear to me that the reason I was interested in making a game console is because I wanted to see what it was like to make a game console,' Blackley says. 'There you go. The reason I love video games as a medium is because it's the equivalent of the thing I love so much. It's an active experience. It's like you found out for yourself what it was like to go to another planet. Why watch someone else go to another planet when you can do it?'
And why eat someone else's chocolate when you can make your own?
'It's curiosity,' Blackley says. 'Chocolate is a plant. We grow chocolate. Let's try it. It's one thing to read about it or go to a chocolate farm in Hawaii. That's great. But for me, that's not enough. I want to know what that's like.'
Their ambitions, the pair insist, weren't incredibly high. 'We didn't know that the chocolate was going to be different than other chocolate,' Sefami says. 'We thought we'd get some crappy chocolate and that would be fun. Maybe we'll get a bar out of one tree. 'Hey, we made chocolate!' And then we'll move on.'
Only now, they're not interested in stopping. Blackley says they're just getting started.
'In my heart, I'm a jazz piano player,' Blackley says. 'The key to great jazz and great music is that it exists on a set of rules so that people can understand it and get their head around it. You have to have a lot of chops. If you have a sufficient amount of skill, then it seems like art — it seems totally free. That's the result of working your ass off. We're trying to work our asses off so that we earn the right to do the art.'
LetterPress Chocolate is one of the most acclaimed bean-to-bar creators in Los Angeles, and the husband-and-wife-founded company hosted chocolate-making tours out of its Beverlywood shop up until recently, before shuttering the company at the end of March. (The last day to order chocolate online from LetterPress is March 24.)
Co-founder David Menkes cites myriad reasons for ending operations — their lease is up, he needs surgery after a car accident, he still works as a visual effects artist and, perhaps most important, the price of cacao beans is rising to the point in which he would have to double the cost of his $10-and-above bars. On a recent evening I handed him a piece of chocolate from the Blackley lab and told him that L..A. is currently home to someone growing their own cacao trees and aiming to start a chocolate enterprise.
Menkes' first reaction: 'They have lots of money.'
Although conversations with Blackley and Sefami don't delve heavily into financials, there's no doubt that to grow enough indoor trees over multiple years to create a full-on chocolate enterprise will require a large investment. But after initial reactions to his chocolate, Blackley says, he has something of a responsibility to this city to create this operation.
'This whole chocolate thing was an accident,' Blackley says, 'but I feel strongly that, because it turned out really well, we have some sort of financial duty to work really hard at it and let a lot of people have it.'
Blackley's current batches yield a thick-cut block of dark chocolate, requiring an ever-so-slightly forceful bite to crack it. Do so, and you'll be hit with a bold arrival of of toasty, hearty mocha. Let it linger and start to melt, and there's almost a dusty earthiness to the chocolate. As it breaks down, it feels as if it's burrowing into your taste buds, the weighty flavor of the bar pulsating long after it is gone.
'I had it 10 minutes ago, and I can still faintly taste it,' says Sefami of this observation.
'We're not sure why,' Blackley says, adding that they have ideas and will start breaking down the chocolate even more, capturing aromatics and more seriously analyzing its molecule makeup. 'We approached this like we approach other science engineering problems.'
Blackley says he's been encouraged to pursue his chocolate enterprise by the likes of acclaimed chef — and friend — José Andrés, who recently opened an outpost of his Mediterranean restaurant Zaytinya in Culver City. Andrés, says Blackley, has expressed a desire to use the chocolate in his restaurants. 'He occasionally emails and says, 'OK, Seamus, the chocolate. What are we doing?''
While Andrés, via a spokesperson, did not respond to requests for comment by deadline, Blackley is asked what he and others favorable to the chocolate are noticing. Blackley, who documents his chocolate-making process on social media for those interested in the nitty-gritty, such as his home method for simulating the tropical fermentation process, says, 'It's just, it's the max. We try to make the maximum of what it is. I think it's delicious just because there's nothing in it.'
Blackley is outspoken. He once, for instance, got in trouble with Microsoft brass for using a masturbation-versus-sex analogy in the press to explain the difference between single and multiplayer games. Despite almost losing his job, he doesn't regret it, noting this was an era before multiplayer gaming would transform the industry, and he felt frustrated in getting people to see his point of view. And so he prefaces that he's not trying to be a 'pretentious a—' when explaining the appeal of his chocolate but adds that after making some initial batches, he went on a chocolate-buying spree.
His analysis? 'I was like, 'All of this tastes dead,'' remarking that it felt like 'things are added.'
I took the chocolate to LetterPress' Menkes because I wanted an opinion from someone on the local scene known for quality chocolate. Menkes agreed that there's a residual effect to the chocolate and said he was pleased with the roast.
'The thing I'm surprised by most is the roast, because usually people screw up the roast,' Menkes says, although he adds that its boldness might make someone's mouth go 'numb,' the chocolate equivalent of, say, a really hoppy beer.
Blackley concedes that his chocolate will taste and feel different to those who have been weaned on commercial bars or even what is typically celebrated on the small-batch scene. There's a simple reason, he says: He's making chocolate in Los Angeles rather than near the equator.
'The mix of organisms are Angeleno organisms,' Blackley says. 'They're not in Costa Rica or Barbados. They're not where cacao is usually found. And just like in sourdough, when you have a different set of microorganisms in the fermentation, the bread tastes different. We have Los Angeles organisms doing this, and we'll keep on optimizing.'
That's what truly excites Blackley and Sefami. It's chocolate that is Los Angeles-grown and perhaps even flavored by this city. And then, for a moment, Blackley does channel his inner Willy Wonka, wondering if, through chocolate, we can rediscover some childlike wonder and inquisitiveness.
'When you're not evaluating it against some kind of standard,' says Blackley, 'you can be a kid again.'
A Los Angeles chocolate company complete with its own cacao trees? It takes, perhaps, a dreamer of dreams.