Browsing the web, I happened across the menu for Daniel, a three-star French restaurant in New York. (For fun, count all the items on the menu that require prep work…it’s exhausting just to contemplate.) The feature of the menu that I’d like to applaud is that he (or, rather, his pastry chef) calls out the specific chocolates used in the desserts. Unsurprisingly, they are Valhrona stalwarts, but identifying them is an admirable step forward.
Being a chocolate obsessive, I’ve taken to asking waiters what chocolate the pastry chef is employing, which often starts some interesting questions. (And, on at least one occasion, free goodies from the pastry kitchen!) At Melisse in Los Angeles, the waiter was hugely knowledgeable about wine, but was in the “could be pumped from the ground” category of knowledge about chocolate. For better or worse, he left that evening knowing more a lot more about chocolate….
Spread the word….start asking where your chocolate dessert is coming from!
For reference, I know that L’Atelier du Joel Robuchon uses Valhrona, Chez Panisse uses Michel Cluizel.
COCO 500 in San Francisco offers a dessert option of a tasting of El Rey Bucare.
CacaoLab 
Hey, I had dinner at Daniel’s. I thought it was good, but I liked Cafe Boulud better — Daniel’s (especially with its curtained off tables for rich Sheik’s and Japanese bosses) was just unbearably uncomfortable.