“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.
It was so upsetting that he thought, I should open a grocery store one day.
Six years later, Nussdorf claims to be just weeks away from opening said store, a gourmet grocery called Meadow Lane, in Tribeca. He has been teasing its arrival for months on social media, documenting delays and inspection travails for his 130,000 TikTok followers, who know Nussdorf as @brokebackcontessa. (The name is a mishmash of the film Brokeback Mountain and Ina Garten’s Barefoot Contessa books.)
Despite the store’s not being open yet, Nussdorf has partnered with virtually every New York City influencer, from the Pheloung twins to Dairy Boy’s Paige Lorenze (soon to be married to the tennis player Tommy Paul), and is considering hiring a “very chic lady” who ran the door at Socialista, the nightclub above Cipriani Downtown, to manage what he expects to be extremely long lines.
Meadow Lane is the latest in a string of luxury groceries that have cropped up since Dean & DeLuca was shuttered. The list includes Rigor Hill Market, a Tribeca gourmet to-go shop run by the Michelin-starred restaurant One White Street, next door; Happier Grocery, also in Tribeca, seen by many as New York’s equivalent of Los Angeles’s Erewhon; and Butterfield Market, on the Upper East Side, which next year will celebrate its centenary but has seen a renaissance of late, with Gen Z–ers in activewear crowding the aisles once reserved for the neighborhood’s tony moms.
Nussdorf has made a point of eating at Rigor Hill in the months since announcing his plans to open Meadow Lane just three blocks to the northeast—something that’s not been lost on the former’s employees. “The managers and the barista all know,” says Ryan Sohn, a managing partner of Rigor Hill. “They talk about it when Sammy comes in.”
On the surface, this all seems benign enough. “Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery,” Sohn says.
Nussdorf, meanwhile, took to TikTok recently to review a meal he’d bought at Rigor Hill. “I feel like people think I should feel weird about this, but I don’t. Thirty more concepts like Meadow Lane, Happier Grocery, Rigor Hill—they could all coexist.”
Then he added: “But I was really shook that it was $15 for six pieces of asparagus.”
The price of food in the city, whether prepared to go or eaten in restaurants, has skyrocketed in recent years. A pound of chicken salad, a once poor man’s food seemingly single-handedly made popular again by the Real Housewife turned TikTok star Bethenny Frankel, can now cost more than $20.
Despite professing his support for the other luxury groceries, Nussdorf tells me he will undercut them on pricing. “We have a bigger container of chicken salad than our competitors,” he says. “And our chickens are from this Amish butcher, and the chickens look like European chickens. They’re the gold-standard chicken, and we’re selling it for $12, and our competitors are selling it for, like, $20.”
Happier Grocery’s hot-honey chicken salad is currently priced at just over $22 per pound, while Butterfield’s tarragon chicken salad costs just over $17. Rigor Hill has made the perhaps wise decision not to enter the chicken-salad wars at the present moment.
Rigor Hill, which has its own farm that supplies it with chickens, eggs, and produce, has been so successful that it’s already planning a second Manhattan shop, on either the Upper East Side, in the West Village, or in downtown Brooklyn, plus a West Coast expansion, in Santa Barbara.
Meanwhile, three blocks north, Happier Grocery has staked out its own territory. Launched in 2023 by former Marc Jacobs designer Wells Stellberger, it has quickly become a downtown fixture.
Stellberger imagined it as part grocery, part “cultural salon.” Think organic produce, supplements, raw milk, and $20 butter, but also curated bookshelves of novels, a private dinner space upstairs, and collaborations with Jacobs as well as Juilliard-ballerina-turned-Mormon-trad-wife influencer Hannah Neeleman, of Ballerina Farm, whose protein powder is used to make the grocery’s TikTok-viral frozen yogurt.
Nussdorf was hoping to use Ballerina Farm’s protein powder in his smoothies at Meadow Lane. “She was here in the store yesterday,” he said when I spoke to him last week.
“We have an exclusive with her,” retorts Stellberger.
Stellberger is also part of the team behind the Water Street Associates (W.S.A.) building, in the financial district, which The New York Times recently crowned the city’s first “It” building, for its history of hosting starry parties as well as having an Aman spa. “We like to not be on the beaten path, so to speak,” explains Stellberger when asked about the unusual choice of locations for both W.S.A. and Happier Grocery, which is located among the counterfeit-bag salesmen of Canal Street.
Stellberger says the same will be true for Happier Grocery’s next location, the planning for which is in the works. “We’re less interested in competition than in what’s next,” he says. “People can reference what we’re doing. But we’re 10 steps ahead.”
Butterfield, which has two locations uptown, seems to be watching the newcomers with mild detachment. “I should be doing more market research,” admits third-generation co-owner Joelle Obsatz, “but we’re so focused on training and culture here.”
Obsatz, too, is getting ready to expand Butterfield, ideally to a downtown location. The grocery has also leaned into influencer smoothie collaborations in the past year, a model pioneered by Erewhon in Los Angeles. But Obsatz insists she isn’t easily swayed by trends. After sampling Happier Grocery’s Ballerina Farm frozen yogurt, she thought, I’ll go back and get some Butterfield fro-yo and save my calories.
Earlier this month, the luxury-grocery landscape shifted again, with news that Erewhon itself was finally coming to New York. Nussdorf swiftly took to TikTok to point out that it would be open only to members of a new padel sports club in Hudson Square, one that he’d been invited to but declined to become a member of.
And so the circle tightens.
Clara Molot is the Investigations Editor at Air Mail
