gourmet foods

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

Dean & Deluca is the winner of the Luxist Awards' 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

Tags: awards-main, best in food, best online gourmet food, Dean Deluca, editors choice award, gourmet food, gourmet foods, luxist-awards, winners-editors-choice, winners-food

Continue reading “Dean & DeLuca Wins Luxists' Editors' Choice Award for Best in Food”

East India Company Revived As Luxury Brand

by Deidre Woollard (RSS feed) —

Filed under: Luxury Shopping

If you've ever studied the history of the British Empire you've probably heard of the East India Company, the English trading giant that shipped commodities to the West from India, China and the Spice Islands. The company began way back in 1600 under the reign of Queen Elizabeth I but now it's back in the hands of Sanjiv Mehta, an Indian-born importer and entrepreneur who bought the intellectual property rights to the company in 2005. He plans to revive the label as a luxury brand after it had lain dormant for more than 100 years, ceasing trading in 1874. The new East India Co. is a luxury story on London's Regent Street that sells tea, chocolate, coffee and other gourmet gifts with an exotic feel, an echo of the time when the company brought the exotic foods of the East to the rest of the world. The store has a "tea library" with more than 100 different types of tea. According to a CNN article, Mehta has invested around $20 million in the company and hopes to eventually sell leather goods, jewelry and home decor items.

Tags: East India Company, gourmet foods, london

Dean & DeLuca Wins Readers' Choice Award for Best Online Gourmet Food

by Carrie Coolidge (RSS feed) —

Filed under: Dining

Dean & DeLuca is the winner of the Readers' Choice Award for Best Online Gourmet Food.

Though it's now one of America's finest online grocers -- offering a wide array of food, wine and even kitchenware --- the New York-based company got its start well before the information superhighway received its first coat of pavement.

In the 1970's, Joel Dean and Giorgio DeLuca traipsed around the world in search of artisan-produced foods that pleased their customers as well as themselves. They wanted products that fired their imaginations, challenged their tastes and turned dinner into a creative exercise.

When the partners opened the original Dean & DeLuca in Soho in September 1977, the neighborhood wasn't the hopelessly chic shopping enclave it is today; rather, it was an authentically gritty corner of the Big Apple. As such, founding partner, Jack Ceglic, designed the first store to evoke a turn-of-the-century food department. Beneath the whir of ceiling fans, high shelves brimmed with rare artisan foodstuffs from flavored salts to cured meats.

Joel and Giorgio continued to expand their operation, adding another New York shop with four times the space of the original in 1988. Boutiques throughout the city followed, as did locations in Charlotte, Kansas City and Washington, D.C. Demand for the grocer's goods even spawned a store in Tokyo.

Dean & DeLuca's wide array of gourmet offerings range from black truffle barbecue sauce, cilantro lime butter and tapas to Asian inspired delicacies such as green tea truffles, purple sweet potato vinegar and organic sushi rice. It also has an impressive selection of meats, seafood, pates, ready-to-serve appetizers, artisanal cheeses and sweets. In search of a Mediterranean sea salt? How about a Himalayan salt harvested from the beds of ancient seas? Look no further than Dean & DeLuca. The company has also launched a new wine division with knowledgeable staff who can recommend the best food and wine pairings for any event.

Today, website makes the grocer's trademark meats, fish, cheeses, herbs and spices available to those who aren't lucky enough to have a store nearby. Dean & DeLuca also markets its private label products to other retailers and wholesalers throughout the world.

Gallery: More from Dean & DeLuca

Tags: awards-main, dean deluca, DeanDeluca, food-awards, gourmet, gourmet foods, GourmetFoods, luxist-awards, online gourmet food, OnlineGourmetFood, winners-food