“So sad!” The words, scrawled in pink lipstick above a taped letter on Dean & DeLuca’s front door in SoHo, marked the end of an era. On October 8, 2019, after 42 years, the gourmet grocery store was gone.
For Sammy Nussdorf, then a fresh-faced, 22-year-old N.Y.U. grad working at a private-equity-and-venture-capital firm owned by his billionaire family, the closure felt personal. “We’d go to Dean & DeLuca and get prepared foods, hang out, get a coffee, and we loved it,” he says of his early days working in the city.
