The original literal title means very little outside Mexico (it refers to the exact boiling temperature water needs to reach in order to make hot chocolate). Therefore, in France the title has been changed into "Bitter Chocolate", in Poland into "Quails in Rose Petals" and in Japan into "The Legend of the Rose Petal Sauce".
The film became the highest-grossing foreign-language film ever released in the United States at the time.
An aspiring filmmaker from Texas, who was not involved with the project, spent time on set, because he was in town shooting a small budget ($5,000) full-length feature film for the Spanish home video market. That young filmmaker was Robert Rodriguez, and the film was El Mariachi, which became a hit at Sundance and launched his career.
To further mine the food-as-aphrodisiac theme of this film, Miramax persuaded 30 Mexican restaurants nationwide to recreate dishes from the film and invited amateur chefs to submit their most seductive recipes for a prize: a trip to Mexico. But the studio's greatest coup was two parties in New York during July, celebrating the fact that the film had outgrossed "Cinema Paradiso" to become the most successful foreign-language film of the last 10 years. The first drew a thousand people (including Mayor David N. Dinkins) to Amazon Village, a TriBeCa nightspot. Partygoers watched the actress Claudette Maille reprise the film's nude horseback-riding scene on the West Side Highway, then feasted on a wedding banquet identical to the one in the movie.