A year after Dean & DeLuca opened in SoHo, The New Yorker described women on neighborhood gallery tours nearly missing their buses back to the suburbs because they stopped to “gape at the marvels” inside the store. Food, cookware and household objects filled the ground floor of a former factory on Prince Street. Imported cheeses, charcuterie, breads, herbs, fruit, pottery and kitchen tools were arranged against the white brick walls and white columns of the loft with enough intention that the magazine compared the displays to Renaissance paintings.
Dean & DeLuca was not the first specialty-food store in America. New York already had institutions including Balducci’s, specialty grocers had long imported food, and the Specialty Food Association had been established decades before. What Joel Dean, Giorgio DeLuca and Jack Ceglic demonstrated was that a grocery store could organize itself around taste. Selection, presentation, design, discovery and expertise could all add meaning to the food being sold, and that meaning could create value of its own.
This is the beginning of a Valedictorian series on specialty grocery. Over the next several issues, we’ll visit Formaggio Kitchen in Cambridge, Zingerman’s in Ann Arbor, Rainbow Grocery in San Francisco, Phoenicia Specialty Foods in Houston and Erewhon in Los Angeles. Each has built something different around the basic act of buying food.
Designing Discovery
Dean, DeLuca and Ceglic opened the store in 1977. DeLuca had already operated a cheese shop nearby. Dean came from publishing. Ceglic was an artist. The three had cooked together for years, and the store they built combined food, cookware, art and design around an idea that feels much less unusual today because businesses like theirs helped make it familiar.
A grocery store did not have to organize itself only around staples and household provisions. It could carry something just because it was unusually good, pleasurable or worth knowing. Customers could compare olive oils, taste cheeses they had never heard of, find produce conventional supermarkets didn’t carry or take home chef-prepared food they could rely on. Cookware and books sat beside ingredients, giving people a way to understand what to do with what they found.
That required expertise beyond keeping shelves stocked. Someone had to find the products and decide what deserved to be carried. The store had to understand how foods related to one another and how people might use them, then organize those decisions clearly enough that someone could stumble across an unfamiliar ingredient and leave knowing how to enjoy it.
Ceglic designed the original store inside a former factory at 121 Prince Street. The founders spent roughly a year rebuilding the space themselves. They kept it spare, using metal shelving and arranging products almost as still lifes, allowing shape, color and abundance to create much of the visual experience. Ceglic later described the result simply: “Art, design, and food became one.”
Among the early customers were Donald Judd, one of the defining figures of American Minimalism, and sculptor Louise Nevelson. Dean & DeLuca was operating inside a SoHo culture already accustomed to treating objects, materials and presentation as things worthy of close attention. Ceglic later recalled that artists understood what the store was doing and were willing to buy a smaller amount of something exceptional rather than more of something ordinary.
Giorgio DeLuca traveled looking for products. Staff encouraged customers to taste them. The business developed importing relationships and worked with growers to source produce. Felipe Rojas-Lombardi, who had worked with James Beard, joined the store and developed pâtés, salads, pasta, roast chicken and other prepared foods before chef-prepared food became a standard part of upscale grocery.
Dean & DeLuca arrived at an unusually receptive moment in American food history.
Julia Child had spent the previous decade using television to make French cooking accessible to American home cooks. Jacques Pépin published La Technique in 1976, turning professional technique into something a serious home cook could study. Alice Waters had opened Chez Panisse in Berkeley in 1971 around ingredients, seasonality and a closer relationship between cooking and agricultural quality. Across the country, curiosity about food was widening beyond nutrition and convenience toward pleasure, provenance and technique.
Only a generation earlier, the supermarkets Pépin encountered had offered far less variety. Pépin has recalled arriving in New York in 1959 and finding produce sections dominated by iceberg lettuce, with mushrooms more likely to be canned and shelved in an aisle. By 1977, expectations were changing, but bringing unfamiliar products into a store still meant teaching people how to identify and use them.
A 1979 account of Dean & DeLuca described dozens of French goat cheeses, fresh truffles, dried mushrooms, quail eggs and specialized kitchen tools. Balsamic vinegar, radicchio and sun-dried tomatoes, now common enough to appear in supermarkets across the country, were still unfamiliar enough to many shoppers that simply placing them on a shelf was not sufficient.
Dean & DeLuca was responding to changing American taste while helping shape it. Repeatedly producing that discovery required an operating system behind the visual experience. Staff tasted products and learned enough to suggest something based on what a customer wanted to cook, serve or experience. Sampling reduced the risk of trying something unfamiliar. Prepared food showed what ingredients could become. Cookware and books made the path from purchase to use clearer.
Mail order grew out of the same logic. Ceglic recalled that Donald Judd wanted food he bought in SoHo shipped to his home in Marfa. Dean & DeLuca began sending it, then built a catalog business that allowed its products and choices to travel far beyond Prince Street.
Taste, environment, presentation and judgment were becoming part of the value of the food itself.
In 2015, the Specialty Food Association named Dean, DeLuca and Ceglic Lifetime Achievement honorees, crediting the trio with redefining specialty food and inspiring thousands of retailers to emulate their model. Features that once helped make Dean & DeLuca distinctive gradually became familiar elsewhere: industrial shelving, carefully composed displays, expansive prepared-food programs and the idea that grocery shopping could involve discovery rather than only replenishment.
What had once felt unfamiliar was becoming a category.
Meaning
By 1988, the original store could no longer contain the business.
Dean & DeLuca moved down Prince Street to a roughly 10,000-square-foot market at Broadway and Prince. The larger space added meat and fish and created room for more categories while Ceglic preserved an open-market design logic through white surfaces, butcher block, stainless steel and distinct counters that continued to direct attention toward the food.
The company also created more ways to engage and shop. Prepared food expanded. Mail order carried the assortment across the country. Espresso bars offered another reason to stop in. By 1992, fifteen years after opening, Dean & DeLuca was generating roughly $20 million annually from its market, mail-order operation and Manhattan espresso bars.
Somewhere along the way, the store itself began to mean something beyond the food.
By the late 1990s and early 2000s, Dean & DeLuca became cultural shorthand. On Felicity, the store was cast as a recurring workplace where Felicity and her friends spent meaningful time. In the novel American Psycho, Patrick Bateman name-checks Italian sea salt from Dean & DeLuca as part of the obsessive vocabulary of brands and consumption.
Then there is The Devil Wears Prada, when Nate, a chef, arrives home with a Dean & DeLuca bag and tells Andrea that the store charges “like, five dollars a strawberry,” but he bought there anyway because he thought they were celebrating.
The joke drew on the emergence of a new cultural identity around food. New York restaurant critic and food writer Gael Greene used the term “foodies” in a 1980 New York magazine piece. By 1984, writers Ann Barr and Paul Levy had published The Official Foodie Handbook, satirizing a recognizable class of people who treated food not simply as sustenance but as culture, knowledge and lifestyle.
Being interested in food was no longer only about cooking or appetite. It could communicate discernment, knowledge, travel, income and a particular kind of urban sophistication.
Dean & DeLuca was right at the center of that emerging urban food culture.
Scaling
Dean & DeLuca opened a large market in Georgetown in 1993 while continuing to develop smaller formats in New York. By 1995, the company employed roughly 450 people and generated about $30 million in annual sales.
That year marked a more consequential transition.
After nearly 20 years, Dean and DeLuca were ready to step away from daily management and sold a controlling interest to entrepreneur Leslie Rudd, who had national restaurant experience with Lone Star Steakhouse. Both founders remained shareholders and board members, while Dane Neller became president and CEO. The ambition was explicit: Dean & DeLuca had proven that the concept worked in New York and Washington. The next ownership group wanted to make it a national company.
Sales continued to grow, reaching roughly $51 million by 1999. Stores, cafés, licensing arrangements and international operations followed.
Then, in 2014, Dean & DeLuca became valuable in another way.
Thai property developer Pace Development acquired the company for $140 million. The transaction included eleven U.S. outlets, two commissaries and licensing agreements covering thirty-one international locations.
Pace described Dean & DeLuca as an iconic lifestyle brand and said the acquisition would strengthen its super-premium mixed-use developments while providing a platform for aggressive international expansion. Pace proposed taking Dean & DeLuca into fifteen countries and developing hundreds of additional locations.
The expansion strategy eventually unraveled.
By 2019, U.S. stores were closing amid unpaid vendors, terminated leases and mounting financial problems. The SoHo flagship closed that year. On March 31, 2020, Dean & DeLuca’s U.S. entities filed voluntary Chapter 11 petitions in the Southern District of New York after the company had ceased its direct retail operations. Bankruptcy filings described a liquidity crisis following years of operating losses after Pace’s acquisition.
When the series reaches Erewhon, we’ll return to Dean & DeLuca and follow the decisions that shaped the company’s growth: what management chose, what evidence it had, what conditions it faced and what happened next. The comparison will let us examine how the economics and social meaning of specialty grocery have changed, and why a similar decision might produce a different result in another time and place.
Back in 2021, a year after Dean & DeLuca’s U.S. entities filed for bankruptcy, Formaggio Kitchen, which began operations in Cambridge, MA, one year after Dean & DeLuca in 1978, moved from its longtime 244 Huron Avenue storefront into the larger former Fresh Pond Market space at 358 Huron Avenue.
This is where the series goes next.