The future of Dean & Deluca is in doubt

In the early 1990s, when I was a fresh-faced recent college graduate working in my first “real” job, I also leased my first apartment and therefore had my first “real” kitchen. No more dorm room microwave cooking for me, I thought triumphantly. I began to experiment in the kitchen, scouring food magazines for new recipes, but never straying far from the conventional (read: boring) foods of my Midwestern upbringing. It was during this experimentation phase that I traveled to Washington, DC for work. I had a rental car and time on my hands after things wrapped up early on a Friday afternoon, so I took the advice offered by my boss, who knew I was interested in food, to go to the Dean & Deluca in Georgetown.

When I entered the store, I immediately realized that I knew nothing about food. The sheer number of items that I had never even heard of was overwhelming, yet exhilarating. The cheese section alone was a source of fascination: a U-shaped counter that spanned almost half the length of the store, it was filled with a mind-boggling array of cheese ranging from rich triple-crèmes to hunks of aged Parmesan glistening with salty, delicious crystals. The counter also possessed a handful of employees at the ready to answer questions – and, as I discovered, to offer samples. I had entered a food lover’s paradise. 

The chic open shelves of the store were stacked with a dizzying array of spices, pastas, grains, teas, coffees, chocolates, and ingredients that I could not even identify. As I picked up the jars of aged balsamic and single-original chocolates, I came to another realization: this shit was expensive. After my budget-breaking shopping excursion was over, I returned home armed with a gaggle of new ingredients and a couple pieces of equipment, more excited than ever to learn about cooking.

My visit to Dean & Deluca spurred my quest to learn about foods that went far afield from the protein + starch + overcooked vegetable formula that I brought with me from my family’s kitchen. The store provided inspiration, since the small city where I lived had nothing like it, there was no Amazon to turn to for ordering unusual ingredients, and Google had yet to become a verb.

In time, my fascination with Dean & Deluca waned. The ingredients to which they introduced me – and a large portion of the US East Coast population – became so popular that they started turning up in chain grocery stores, and at a more affordable price point to boot. Still, when work called me to DC, I faithfully visited Dean & Deluca, the source of inspiration early in my cooking career.

It’s been a couple of years since I set foot inside the store, and on my last visit I noticed that the shelves did not seem quite as stuffed with interesting ingredients as I had remembered. I chalked the discrepancy up to an exuberant memory, but the impression may have been correct. Recently Dean & Deluca’s parent company shuttered several of its stores, and the rest seem to be in peril.

It turns out that my initial visit to the store was during the company’s peak, and its profitability has been on a downhill slide ever since. The future of every Dean & Deluca location is in doubt. Since the store was such a seminal part of my early cooking career, this news comes with more than a tinge of sadness. On the other hand, I find that I no longer need the stores for inspiration. My ever-growing cookbook collection provides me with inspiration, and I have access to a bevy of markets that carry products that were once difficult to find almost anywhere but Dean & Deluca. I hope the chain can find its way, but even if it doesn’t, its legacy lives on.