food-awards

Petrossian is a nominee for a Luxist Award in the Best Caviar Retailer category.

Perhaps the most storied of caviar's purveyors, Petrossian traces its roots to a pair of Armenian brothers who brought their love of roe from the shores of the Caspian Sea to the edge of the Atlantic in the 1920s. Melkoum and Mouchegh Petrossian migrated from Eastern Europe to Paris to continue their studies in law and medicine, but found the City of Light woefully devoid of their favorite Russian delicacy.

Since then, Petrossian has grown to become the premier buyer and importer of Russian caviar worldwide. Its Tsar Imperial label graces some of the finest Beluga, Ossetra and Sevruga on the market. To this day, the company insists that members of the Petrossian family personally select the best of every Russian caviar catch.

Fortunately for those whose appetite for adventure doesn't outweigh the appetite for quality caviar, accompanying modern-day Petrossians on a Russian fishing scow isn't the only way to enjoy their caviar. The company offers delivery, as well as restaurant locations in Los Angeles, Las Vegas and New York.

Founded in 1984, New York's Petrossian restaurant is a special treat. Ideally located for opera goers of discerning taste, it's housed in the historic Alwyn Court Building on Manhattan's West Side, one block from Carnegie Hall and four blocks from Lincoln Center. Melkoum and Mouchegh would most certainly be proud.

Vote now for what you believe is the best of breed in Gourmet Foods. Readers' Choice Awards for Food will be announced on November 30th.

Gallery: More from Petrossian

Farmstead is a nominee for a Luxist Award in the Best Cheese Shop category.

The company was founded in 2003 by the husband-and-wife team of Matt and Kate Jennings. They're a well-qualified duo: Matt graduated from culinary school in Vermont in 1995, worked for artisan cheese stores and producers across the country, and studied with master cheesemongers in the U.K, France and Italy. Kate is a classically trained pastry chef.

As co-owners of Providence, R.I.-based Farmstead, Matt and Kate develop close relationships with producers and hand-select fine foodstuffs, specializing in small production, limited release cheeses. As an extension of this hands-on approach, Farmstead aims to educate its customers on the subtleties and history of cheese, offering product tastings, cooking demonstrations, and cheese and beverage pairing classes.

Farmstead's signature cheeses include "Sarabande," co-designed with Dancing Cow Farm of Vermont and boasting hints of hazelnut, sherry, and fresh farm cream at its peak ripeness. Another, called "Drunkin' Providence," is flavorful cheddar washed with Thomas Tew Rum from Rhode Island's Newport Distilling Company.

The Jennings founded Farmstead's sister restaurant, La Laiterie, in 2006 to augment their offerings. Located next to the cheese shop, the bistro serves seasonally influenced meals with fresh ingredients from local sustainable farms; the menu sometimes changes daily. Matt and Kate designed the restaurant themselves, accenting their rustic cuisine with hand-made rust colored paper lights and an interior made from reclaimed barn wood, forged iron and Vermont soapstone.

For those who can't make the trip to Wayland Square, the historical shopping district Providence, to inspect Farmstead's cheeses in person, the company offers a comprehensive website along with speedy delivery options. Rest assured, the cheese will still be just as stinky when it arrives.

Vote now for what you believe is the best of breed in Gourmet Foods. Readers' Choice Awards for Food will be announced on November 30th.

Metropolitan Bakery is a Luxist Award nominee in the Best Bread Bakery category.

The bakery opened its doors with the goal of bringing to Philadelphia the amazing breads, its owners, Wendy Smith Born and James Barrett, had tasted in Europe. With a single rack of fresh bread and a shoebox for a cash register, Born and Barrett launched Metropolitan Bakery in 1993. Fifteen years later, what began as an "experiment" between two friends-one a restaurant manager, the other a pastry chef-has grown into a Philadelphia institution.

The partners met while working at Philadelphia's legendary The White Dog Café, which was one of the pioneering institutions of the "buy local" movement. During their time at White Dog, the two friends often lamented how difficult it was to find breads of the quality they'd tasted in Europe. Indeed, the artisan baking process is a slow one. It takes up to two weeks for the natural yeast (made from fermented grapes and figs) to mature, and then another 48 hours for the dough to be mixed, shaped, pounded, left to rise in rye-dusted willow baskets, and then baked in steam-injected, stone-deck ovens. It's this painstaking process that produces the intense, earthy flavors, crackling crusts, and complex textures of artisanal breads.

Barrett's culinary training at the Culinary Institute of America and the Ecole Francaise de Boulangerie d'Aurillac in France, helped him refine the techniques of old-world baking. These experiences and years of trial and error impressed upon him the importance of natural ingredients, traditional methods, and above all, patience, in producing great breads.

In Philadelphia, Metropolitan Bakery has become more than just a great bakery. It is also part of the community. Its owners believe that jobs are the best way out of poverty. As a result, the bakery employs and trains recent parolees, mentors at-risk high school students, and is a co-sponsor of the new H.O.M.E. Page Café in the Free Library, which employs formerly homeless Philadelphians and raises money for Project H.O.M.E. The bakery also donates bread to shelters every week. And because supporting local farmers and purveyors is so important, Metropolitan's five Philadelphia shops offer locally made jams, cheeses, spreads and other specialties. Indeed, most of the products in its stores are made by local farmers, cheesemakers and chefs also trying to preserve artisan traditions. The 19th street store is a pick-up location for community-supported agriculture.

The company has locations in Chestnut Hill, University City, Old City, Rittenhouse Square, and the Reading Terminal Market. It also offers its homemade whole grain granola, coffee chocolate chip granola, pomegranate cinnamon granola, French berry rolls and more for purchase on its website.

Vote now for what you believe is the best of breed in Gourmet Foods. Readers' Choice Awards for Food will be announced on November 30th.

Gallery: More from Metropolitan Bakery

Formaggio Kitchen is a nominee for a Luxist Award in the Best Cheese Shop category.

Formaggio Kitchen has been an institution in Cambridge, Massachusetts for over 30 years. It is a gourmand's paradise doubling as a neighborhood grocer. Visitors go to Formaggio Kitchen to stock up on cheeses, cured meats and baked goods, always leaving with something they've never seen before that is sure to become a new house staple. Chefs, both professional and amateur, rely on Formaggio Kitchen for that special ingredient they can't find anywhere else.

Each year, Formaggio Kitchen staff travel to the far reaches of the planet in search of the world's finest artisan products. Their shelves are brimming with products made by individual artisans, each as wonderful as the next: honeys from Sardinia & Piedmont sit aside farmhouse jams from Pays Basque & l'Ardeche, while spicy organic tomato sauce from Liguria neighbors briny Brittany fleur de sel.

Marble slabs support cuts of cheese artistically arranged each morning. Its cheese selection is from cheesemakers around the world, from North America to Great Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, Austria, Switzerland, Greece and Italy. At any given time, there are more than three hundred cheeses available to Formaggio Kitchen customers.

But it is Formaggio Kitchen's cheese caves, built out of an old office deep in the nether-reaches of the basement beneath Huron Avenue, that makes it most proud. Constructed in 1996 (as the first of its kind in this country) with all the damp, musty, chilly characteristics of an Alpine hillside, the caves now hold its precious stock at their ideal temperature and humidity, creating both a place to age young wheels and maintain moisture in older ones.

Formaggio Kitchen has locations in Cambridge, Ma., in Boston and New York City. Each store carries a similar selection of imported and domestic delicacies, but each has its own flair. The Formaggio Kitchen website offers an overwhelming selection of cheeses from around the world, in addition to an abundance of oils, vinegars, spreads, chocolate, spices, breads, olives, meats, seafood and antipasti.

Vote now for what you believe is the best of breed in Gourmet Foods. Readers' Choice Awards for Food will be announced on November 30th.

Gallery: More from Formaggio Kitchen

ChefShop.com is nominated for a Luxist Award in the Best Online Gourmet Food category.

Located in Seattle, ChefShop.com was started ten years ago in 1999 by a group of people that wanted to change the way people thought about and approached their food. The company's mission is to find the best, healthiest foods and goods from artisans and traditional small farmers around the world and bring them to consumers in the U.S. Chefshop.com is fighting against mass market food production and unsustainable farming practices in hopes of fostering the sale of healthier foods with more flavor and value. ChefShop.com is especially proud of the fact that they work directly with their chosen producers and as a result get the freshest, most flavorful goods possible.

Chefshop.com has both a mail-order website and a brick-and-mortar retail store in Seattle. The store also opened in 1999 and offers, in addition to its many shelves of baked and grocery goods, tasting bars for olive oil, jams, honeys, sea salts, and vinegar. The website, on the other hand, is especially shopper-friendly thanks to options of shopping not only by keyword or category but also by recipe and by what's fresh that day.

Goods must meet several stringent criteria before ChefShop.com will consider carrying them and to date their selection exceeds 1000 items from all over the world.

Vote now for what you believe is the best of breed in Gourmet Foods. Readers' Choice Awards for Food will be announced on November 30th.

Gallery: More from ChefShop.com

La Brea Bakery is nominated for a Luxist Award in the Best Bread Bakery category.

Beginning in 1989, La Brea Bakery changed the way people ate bread. The beautiful artisan loaves that had been hand-made and hearth-baked for centuries in Europe had yet to make their way to North America. La Brea Bakery's founder Chef Nancy Silverton was making plans to open the restaurant Campanile with two partners in Los Angeles, CA. She soon discovered that if they wanted to serve the kind of authentic hearth-baked bread that embodied the quality reflected in the restaurant's menu, Chef Silverton would have to bake the bread herself.

It was then that Silverton embarked upon the journey of learning the ancient art of bread baking. Having mastered her craft, she opened a tiny storefront bakery to sell her renowned breads. While the original bakeshop still exists today, La Brea Bakery now operates three state of the art artisan bakeries in the U.S. and delivers over 150 par-baked bread varieties to grocery retail and restaurants across the entire U.S. and throughout Europe and Asia. La Brea Bakery has never compromised our founder's original craftsmanship or dedication to quality. From holiday-time crouton stuffing mix to special occasion breads and bake-at-home frozen breads, La Brea Bakery is continuously rated as the most preferred brand of artisan bread in the U.S.

The company now has locations in Anaheim, Van Nuys and Los Angeles. Its artisan breads are also available for retail purchase across the country.

Vote now for what you believe is the best of breed in Gourmet Foods. Readers' Choice Awards for Food will be announced on November 30th.

Gallery: More from La Brea Bakery

Tsar Nicoulai Caviar is a nominee for a Luxist Award in the Best Caviar Retailer category.

Beluga may be the well-known star of caviar, but the White Sturgeon roe peddled by Tsar Nicoulai Caviar is the choice of the green generation. Founded in 1978 by husband-and-wife entrepreneurs Mats and Dafne Engstrom, Tsar Nicoulai Caviar raises its fish sustainably in Northern California instead of depleting the endangered ranks of wild sturgeon, as many purveyors in other countries do.

With the help of researchers at the University of California Davis, Tsar Nicoulai has developed a proprietary tank-farming system to raise its fish. Water is pumped from local aquifers into a four-acre hydroponics pond topped with a bloom of natural plankton algae and flanked by a year-round crop of vegetables, creating a mineral-rich environment free of mercury, pesticides, and other harmful chemicals often found in international waters.

March of 2004 marked the opening of the Tsar Nicoulai Caviar Café in San Francisco as a complement to the company's delivery business. Customers across the country can have fresh caviar shipped to their doorstep via Tsar Nicoulai's website; celebrity chefs from Wolfgang Puck in Los Angeles to Charlie Palmer in New York are frequent customers. Tsar Nicoulai Caviar's online operation offers caviar, roe, smoked delicacies and an array of caviar accessories.

In light of recent U.N. and U.S. bans on wild caviar from the Caspian and Black Seas, Tsar Nicoulai seems poised to profit from the switch to sustainably harvested roe. Though the West Coast may never produce roe with the glamour and glitz of Beluga, many restaurateurs are turning to Tsar Nicoulai's California State Ossetra as a cheaper, cleaner, greener alternative to its Caspian counterpart.

Vote now for what you believe is the best of breed in Gourmet Foods. Readers' Choice Awards for Food will be announced on November 30th.

Zingerman's Mail Order has been nominated for a Luxist Award in the Best Online Gourmet Food category. The original Zingerman's Delicatessen was started in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1982 by Paul Saginaw and Ari Weinzweig. It offered a combination of specialty foods, traditional Jewish dishes, and a few sandwiches.

Over the years Zingerman's grew steadily, adding (among others) a bakery, a creamery, a couple of restaurants, and a mail order business to sell it all. Zingerman's Mail Order offers a little bit of everything, all wrapped up in personal touches like excellent customer service and a website that displays everything in charming artistic renditions of reality.

Zingerman's focuses mostly on traditionally made foods, plus a few extras that they deem worthy, but overall the selection is intentionally kept "tight and focused" so people can find what they're looking for more efficiently. They carry goods from all the Zingerman's businesses and this time of year is an especially good time to shop their Thanksgiving selection that includes goodies like Spiced Pecans, Crespone Salami, and their "Turkey Rescue Kit" for making the best of all the seasonal leftovers.

Shop online at Zingermans.com or request a paper catalog by mail here.

Vote now for what you believe is the best of breed in Gourmet Foods. Readers' Choice Awards for Food will be announced on November 30th.

Zabar's is nominated for a Luxist Award in the Best Gourmet Grocer/Food Hall category.

For more than 70 years, Zabar's has been a upper westside institution in Manhattan. The company started in 1934 when Louis and Lillian Zabar rented an Appetizing Counter in a Daitch Market. Their philosophy was to sell only the highest quality smoked fish at a fair price. Zabar wanted his customers to trust him and he wanted them to become "regulars".

Zabar became known for his high standards and developed a reputation of being hard to please. The couple took over the Daitch Market, and and Zabar's was born. The Zabars worked long hours. They roasted their own coffee and hand selected every item that the store would put on its shelves, always wanting to give their customers the best available at a "fair" price.

The Zabar sons, Saul and Stanley Zabar took over running the store, and Zabar's flourished under their management. Over the years the store expanded, taking over neighboring stores, as they became available. The company battled major department stores over caviar prices. New Yorkers came to trust and love Zabar's.

Saul and Stanley still run the business while their children have joined its ranks. Ann Zabar, Saul's oldest daughter, runs the Mail Order Division and helps her father roast coffee and buy smoked fish. David Zabar, Stanley's son, helps run the office and Aaron, Saul's son, manages Zabar's mail order warehouse.

Zabar's is open 365 days a year and there is always a Zabar in the store. Today the store on Broadway and West 80th Street is over 20,000 square feet (almost a city block long). It has more than 250 employees and sells over 8,000 lbs of coffee a week. On average, 35,000 customers a week visit its store. The company's website offers an array of coffee, cheeses and fish. It also has a large selection of cookware, kitchen gadgets and other must-have items, from rice cookers to coffee grinders and espresso makers.

Di Bruno Bros. is nominated for a Luxist Award in the Best Online Gourmet Goods category. It got its start way back in 1939 when two Italian brothers, Danny and Joe Di Bruno, after emigrating from Italy, decided to open a grocery in in the Italian Market in Philadelphia. Their dream was focused around family and community. "A smile doesn't cost you anything," Joe would tell his grandsons. Their store became a touchstone for the community; each customer that walked in the store was treated like family.

Eventually, the store turned from a traditional grocery to having more gourmet imports in honor of the brothers' European roots. Their business and the Di Bruno reputation in the community has continued to grow over the years, and now in addition to the original storefront in the Italian Market there are three other Philadelphia locations and an online shop that makes their products available nationwide. It remains a family business to this day.

To this day, nothing compares to the Di Bruno Bros. experience. The brothers' dedication to culinary pioneering still drives the company to provide the most authentic foods from traditional, artisanal producers, and extraordinary selections of traditional gourmet specialty products that include imported cheeses, charcuterie, oils and vinegars, antipasta and much more.

Di Bruno Bros. also has a line of original creations. Di Bruno Originals includes handmade cheese spreads, gift sets, and a Private Collection that includes such delicacies as Di Bruno Barrel-Aged Balsamic Vinegar and Di Bruno White Truffle Honey. They've also made headlines for their homemade Burrata, which is an Italian-style cheese with a mozzarella shell on the outside and soft mozzarella curd and slightly whipped cream on the inside, Said to pair well with champagne and sweet white wines, it comes in several flavors in addition to the traditional century-old recipe.

Di Bruno Bros. continues to be family-owned and operated, with the original storefront standing proudly at 930 S. 9th Street in Philadelphia's Italian Market. In 2004, Di Bruno Bros. expanded their family, adding a store on Chestnut Street in center city Philadelphia. The company's most recent location opened in 2008 in the Comcast Center as the centerpiece of the market in Philadelphia's tallest building.

Vote now for what you believe is the best of breed in Gourmet Foods. Readers' Choice Awards for Food will be announced on November 30th.

Gallery: More from Di Bruno Bros.

The Harrods Food Hall in London has been nominated for a Luxist Award in the Best Gourmet Grocer/Food Hall category. Harrods is known worldwide for its opulence and grandeur, and the Food Halls are no exception. Harrods has been around since 1834, founded by Charles Henry Harrod and originally operating in a single room selling a mix of grocery goods, perfumes, and stationary items.

Today, it's grown to boast a series of food halls (a luxury food court of sorts) that each specialize in something different but combine to make for a total experience. Many visitors are struck by the sheer volume and selection of international goods, all presented in breathtakingly beautiful displays, counters, and luxury eateries. Harrods is known for offering everything from fine chocolates to lavish cuts of meat and seafood, cheeses, baked goods, and even fine wines, with tasting events scheduled in-house. There are also restaurants serving up gourmet meals, sandwiches, and snacks so you can taste before you buy (or simply enjoy a good meal).

The holidays are an especially grand time of year for Harrods, with many finding great gifts in their selection of food hampers. Prices vary but this year their most divine option is called The Supreme (£1,250) and includes the best of the Food Halls offerings from main courses through dessert, wine and spirits not to be left out.

Many of its products are available for purchase on its website, from pate, biscuits and jam to chocolate, coffee and an impressive selection of teas.

Vote now for what you believe is the best of breed in Gourmet Foods. Readers' Choice Awards for Food will be announced on November 30th.

Caviarteria is a nominee for a Luxist Award in the Best Caviar Retailer category.