Aviva Covitz arrived in the U.S. as a tourist from her native Brazil.
“I came to visit,” she says with a laugh. “I guess I’m still visiting all these years later.”
Covitz’s years in Los Angeles have been anything but leisurely. She raised two sons with her husband, and, realizing there wasn’t much high-end chocolate available in the U.S., opened her own chocolatier in 1983. She wanted the very best and approached Teuscher, the renowned Swiss chocolate company, for the right to sell their exclusive treats.
Her Teuscher Chocolatier became a Beverly Hills institution at the corner of Brighton Way and Camden Drive. Covitz’s sons, Phil and Marc, worked there after school, but neither thought they’d enter in the business. That all changed when their mother, ready to retire, talked to them about their ideas to evolve the store.
From those discussions emerged andSons Chocolatiers, Phil and Marc’s reboot of their mom’s beloved business. The store debuted in 2019 and was an immediate hit. The brothers have expanded their mother’s original sidewalk cafe and serve dessert, coffee and what they claim are the world’s best hot and cold chocolate drinks.
“This is our mom’s legacy,” says Phil. “We wanted to remake the shop by carrying our own hand-made chocolate, redoing the interior and working with local artisans to design the packaging.”
The brothers re-imagined the chocolatier to reflect modern tastes—their bestselling PBJ mixes peanuts from Virginia with jam made from sustainably sourced California strawberries. A key to the makeover is Sandy Tran, former pastry chef at The French Laundry in Napa Valley, whose creations gleam in their boxes, looking more like jewels than edibles.
Fittingly, andSons sells a special Mother’s Day gift box in collaboration with the Huntington Gardens.
Their mom would surely approve.
