Coco Noir is a piece of chocolate gourmet heaven. Beautifully decorated in Rococo style, the overall feel is welcoming, warm and ever so slightly decadent. A round table in the centre of the room offers up myriad delights, while on shelves and dressers around, chocolate truffles and gallettes sit waiting to be consumed.

If that isn’t enough to tempt you, then loose Belgian chocolates behind the glass counter with exotic names like Marouf F, Grand Place and Pistache Truffle should.

The chocolaterie and patisserie is owned by Majid Yazdani, who also runs Café Noir around the corner for his wife’s family. The beautiful interior comes courtesy of interior designer Annie Sloan, who has a shop further up the street.

She was in Café Noir having lunch one day and saw his initial modern ideas and said she could come up with something much better. “When I saw the initial sketch, it had a wow factor,” Mr Yazdani said.

That wow is still present, not just in terms of how it looks, but the prices. This place may look up-market, but it remains affordable.

Mr Yazdani said: “People come to us and say your shop is too posh for Headington, or it looks too expensive, but Belgian chocolates don’t have to be.”

Mr Yazdani, who grew up in Iran and Kuwait, comes from merchant stock.

“My grandfather on my mother’s side was a property developer, and my grandfather on my father’s side was a tea, sugar and rice merchant,” he explained.

Mr Yazdani was particularly close to his paternal grandfather.

“From the age of five or six, he took me to his shop, because we had such a close bonding together.

“I’d count how many sacks of rice he had left, how many sacks of tea and stuff like that.”

Through this simple activity he developed a head for, and love of, business.

He came to Oxford Polytechnic in the late 1980s to study mechanical engineering and had to stay on when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, when he effectively became stateless.

He had been working at Café Noir while studying, and ended up managing the place for five years, on behalf of the Ghomshei family. He eventually married Katy Ghomshei and, although he worked for the UBS bank for a while, he always stayed in close contact with operations at the cafe.

It was while on a business trip for the bank that he came across the Mathez truffles he sells. Indeed, they are indirectly the reason why he started the shop.

“I was at a family-run hotel in Zurich and after the meal they gave us these chocolates which were fantastic,” he said.

At the time, Café Noir gave mint chocolates to customers, but they were not very popular. So they introduced the truffles in 2005 and started selling tins of them.

“The demand was so high that it started to interfere with running the restaurant,” Mr Yazdani said.

Setting up a chocolate shop seemed the obvious solution.

Mr Yazdani is quite the entrepreneur, with textile and chocolate interests in Kuwait. He funded the shop’s start-up costs with money made from selling a game called Hyperdrive around the world.

A go-kart with no wheels, when plugged into a PC or playstation, it allows the player to do a racing game, as though sitting in a car, instead of just having a joystick.

But why Headington for the chocolate shop?

“We knew there was a demand for the chocolate, because people kept coming into the cafe,” he said.

“We knew there was so much demand through the hospitals, local businesses, residents and Oxford Brookes University.”

It was also a boon that their other business was around the corner. And opening a new one in a recession held no fears.

He quoted his grandfather, who said: “In every crisis, there are always opportunities.”

Anyway, he is not alone in believing chocolate is one of the most recession-proof businesses.

“When there is a recession, people are concerned about their jobs and finances. They may not upgrade their car or house, and they don’t go on expensive holidays. But what they will do is treat themselves with a nice box of chocolates.”

So why did he want to sell chocolate himself?

“I love chocolate. I love to see people’s reaction when they walk through the door and the scent of chocolate hits them. Everybody’s happy when they eat chocolate.”

Caroline Anderson, a former Headington resident who now runs a chocolate shop in Canterbury, trained him in the arts of chocolaterie and the pair import chocolates together.

Do his sons, Daniel, 12 and ten-year-old Aria have the same interest in chocolate as he does?

“Daniel loves interacting with customers. He’s always asking questions about what’s in the chocolate and how it’s made.

It is nice to see him being interested. Aria loves eating chocolate but not selling it.”

The same as 99.9 per cent of the people who come into the shop, I imagine.

Name: Coco Noir Established: 2009 Owner: Majid Yazdani

Number of staff: Two Annual turnover: N/A Contact: 01865 236073 Web: www.coconoir.net