For more than four decades, chocolates turned into memories at a local sweets shop.

Customers marked birthdays, holidays and first dates with Panache Chocolatier’s truffles. Corporate clients grabbed boxes of chocolate for partners they wanted to impress. Parents stopped with their kids, introducing their favorite chocolates to the next generation.

Those are only a sliver of the memories that the shop’s owners and its customers will be taking with them.

Four decades, three owners and several accolades later, the popular chocolatier has closed its doors in Leawood. But Julie House, Panache’s latest owner, said she’s closing this chapter while leaving open the possibility that someone else might pick up the recipes and carry Panache’s legacy forward.

Panache Chocolatier was founded in 1979

The chocolate shop was founded at the Country Club Plaza in Kansas City, Missouri, by owners Eileen Cohen and Sharon Hoffman. At the time, it was called Kron Chocolatier.

The shop’s name changed to Panache (French for “with flair”) three years after it first opened. The business was later sold to Mark and Barbara Bailey, Panache’s second owners.

Julie and Derrick House became Panache’s third owners 13 years ago. After acquiring Panache, the couple relocated the shop from the Country Club Plaza to Leawood’s Park Place shopping center, where it remained until its closure.

At the time, Julie House recalled, the new chapter was a leap of faith.

“My qualification for chocolate at the start was I like to eat chocolate,” she said with a laugh. “I knew nothing about making it or anything.”

That leap of faith turned into several years of reinvention. Under House’s ownership, Panache’s focus shifted from novelty candy into what she describes as “luxury” chocolate.

With a background in design, House approaches flavor at Panache the way she once approached interior design: as a creative puzzle to solve.

“We used to talk in colors when I was a designer, and then this became talking in flavors,” she said.

Rather than leaning on eye-catching trends (shiny sprayed bonbons or chocolates covered in transfer-sheet designs), House said she’d wanted to bring Panache back to what she saw as an older, more European idea of chocolate: simple and classic in appearance, precise in technique and straightforward in ingredients.

Panache imported chocolate graded in the top 10% worldwide, which was then combined with fresh creams, florals and herbs, and real berries. In the end, it created a quality difference that House likened to the effect of a farm-to-table restaurant.

That hard work paid off. Panache went on to win Grand Master Chocolatier by the International Chocolate Salon for seven consecutive years.

The shop made a name for itself globally, competing in blind competitions against makers from Switzerland, Australia, Canada and parts of Asia.

“You can’t make high-quality chocolate with inferior product,” she said. “We made every single piece in-house, and we did it all by hand. There was no automation.”

Panache closed at the end of April

House’s job as the owner of Panache has been a demanding one.

Busy holiday seasons at Panache meant 16- to 20-hour days for months at a time; all of that time House spent on her feet, creating chocolates by hand.

At the same time, costs of chocolate continued to rise over the years, making the process not just physically tiring, but more expensive.

Though both of these factors played a role in House’s decision to retire, it was ultimately more personal than that. Her career as a chocolatier went out on a particularly personal note, in fact: by crafting truffles for her daughter’s wedding this month.

“It was just really the right time,” she said. “I’m ready to go explore…spend more time with my husband, travel, enjoy my family.”

As challenging as it can be to run a handmade chocolate business, though, House said she was fueled for years by the emotional reactions those chocolates got from customers.

“People would say, ‘I’ve never had chocolate like this before,’ or ‘This reminds me of when I was in Belgium,’” she said. “Sometimes it was a childhood memory that sparked when they tasted it. I just loved seeing people’s connection to that memory.”

Panache may reopen under different ownership

Though the doors are closed for now, Johnson Countians may not have seen the last of Panache’s chocolates.

Nothing is currently set in stone, but House said she’s hoping someone else will take up the mantle and reopen Panache — either in Leawood or elsewhere.

“We’re hopeful that somebody may come along and want to be interested in taking on the recipes and moving forward,” she said. “Panache has been around for such a long time. We’ve had different generations of customers… I just hope the good memories continue for them.”

While Panache garnered international recognition, its local roots kept growing deeper, both in terms of its local customer base and its partnerships with other small family-owned businesses like theirs.

Those deep roots showed up in the comments when Panache announced its closure on social media. House said she was struck by the outpouring of memories and well wishes.

Even after she turns her attention toward travel and her family and steps away from the kitchen, she suspects one habit will be particularly hard to shake.

“I probably will continue thinking in chocolate,” she joked. “I think that’s always going to kind of be in the back of my mind.”

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