Malena Lopez-Maggi's family-run artisan chocolate shop at 1709 Solano Avenue in North Berkeley closes July 4 after filing Chapter 7 bankruptcy — the casualty of a failed 2023 Rockridge expansion and a $28,000 lease-breakage penalty.

The Xocolate Bar — the handmade-chocolate shop Malena Lopez-Maggi and co-founder Clive Brown have run at 1709 Solano Avenue in North Berkeley since 2008 — will serve its last bonbons on July 4, 2026. A closing celebration is set for 2 to 4 p.m. that day.

Lopez-Maggi announced the closure on June 5, citing Chapter 7 bankruptcy as her "only viable path." The proximate cause was the September 2023 opening of a second location at 5854 College Avenue in Rockridge — a bet that buckled within 17 months under health-department requirements, cocoa-market shocks, and a $28,000 lease-breakage fee after that shop closed February 15, 2026. Easy Breezy Frozen Yogurt took over the College Avenue space April 1.

Before the expansion, Lopez-Maggi had been direct about the production ceiling: "We can't make enough chocolate to stock an entire shop, let alone two shops." The Rockridge attempt proved it. The original operation — a Latina-owned, family-run shop producing bonbons, bark, caramels, and sipping chocolate on-site from fair-trade organic ingredients — had run lean enough to survive 18 years on Solano. The second location was the variable that broke the equation.

Lopez-Maggi and Brown were visual artists (metalsmithing, fused glass) who discovered artisan chocolate at the KPFA Craft Fair in 2005, founded the business the following year out of a kitchen at the Presidio Yacht Club, and landed the Solano storefront in July 2008. Two decades of that build-it-by-hand trajectory couldn't absorb a $28,000 exit penalty on a failed expansion.

Several other East Bay closures landed this week. Malibu's Burgers, the vegan burger spot in Uptown Oakland run by Darren Preston, closed June 6. The Emeryville Public Market location of Koja Kitchen — the Japanese-Korean fusion stall at 5959 Shellmound Street that has operated since 2015 — has also closed; the chain's Berkeley, Dublin, and Fremont outposts remain open. And 84 Viet, a Vietnamese restaurant at 2050 Berkeley Way in downtown Berkeley that opened in 2023, appears to have gone dark: its phone is disconnected and online ordering has been suspended.

The Xocolate Bar's closing celebration runs 2–4 p.m. on July 4 at 1709 Solano Avenue.