best in food

Dean & DeLuca Wins Luxists' Editors' Choice Award for Best in Food

It's Sunday afternoon on New York's affluent Upper East Side, and one look at the crowd milling around the Dean & DeLuca store at Madison and 85th Street gives even the most casual observer a good idea of just how incredibly successful the high-end grocer has become. It should not come as a great surprise, then, that Dean & DeLuca is the recipient of the Luxist Awards' Editors' Choice Award for Best in Food.

Women decked in pearls and Metropolitan Museum of Art pins stroll past color-coordinated fruit displays while men in tweed jackets pause at the seafood counter to choose from King Salmon, Chilean Sea Bass and Black Cod, each at least $20 per pound. An elderly woman from Paris admires a stack of ten squares of chocolate, tied together and wrapped in pastel paper.

"The last time I came in, the first thing I saw were these," she says, pointing to the $62 bundle of chocolates. "They're so pretty that I never even opened them."

Gallery: More from Dean & DeLuca