Edible complex - specialty cheese merchants Dean & Deluca

Washington Monthly, Dec, 1997 by Pilar Guzman

This year marks the 20th birthday of one of New York's most flavorful institutions -- the Vatican of Vichyssoise, the Pantheon of Porcini, the Alhambra of Arugula: Dean & Deluca. With "you eat with your eyes first" as its mantra, the store's carefully cultivated mystique has lured countless pilgrims into its 9,700-square-feet of converted SoHo loft space since founding fathers Giorgio Deluca, Joel Dean, and Jack Ceglac first set up shop at the comer of Broadway and Prince. But make no mistake, this is more than just an overpriced gourmet grocery. With its signature medley of marble slabs and crusty breads, stainless steel and Moroccan trout, wooden crates and runny Stiltons, Dean & Deluca has pioneered an overall aesthetic that is more lifestyle museum than mere food Mecca.

As a seasoned Dean & Deluca voyeur, I was familiar with the sophisticated, bespectacled grad-student type that worked the cheese counter. And so it was that, finding myself with time on my hands between writing gigs and a hankering for cheese knowledge, I recently filled out an application to join their ranks. The store manager was perplexed by my eclectic and oddly unrelated job experience (not to mention a lack of retail experience of any sort), but he was clearly desperate and hopeful enough to take a chance on my earnest demeanor and conspicuous passion for all things edible. A life-long student, I treated my new job like any other academic undertaking. I taught myself the basics, did some extracurricular reading, and asked a lot of questions.

The Glass Effect[TM]

I spent the first week on the back counter learning proper Dean & Deluca cheese-wrapping techniques. I took great pride in stretching the Saran wrap to the point of creaselessness. The key, I was told, was to cut the plastic just the right size -- excess Saran makes it difficult to achieve the necessary tension and too small a piece causes tears in the plastic, thus defeating the sealing function. It's one of those tricks of the trade that, once acquired, can be taken anywhere!

By day two, I was just starting to get the hang of it when suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I spied Giorgio Deluca -- aesthetic czar, foodie, and former history teacher -- across the marbled aisle. In the midst of his wildly gesticulative critique of the olive oil display, I could feel his eyes burning a hole into my novice cheese-wrapping hands. Uh-oh, he was heading toward me. With childlike logic, I reasoned that if our eyes didn't meet, he would somehow disappear. I assessed the unwrapped half-wheel of Pecorino Corsignano (a delightful aged Italian sheep's-milk cheese) and unrolled what I had calculated to be the proper amount of plastic. As I attempted to make the swift cut, his arrival broke my confident perforating stroke. The plastic began to pull and pucker. He nudged me aside and grabbed the cheese from my trembling hands, exclaiming, "Wrapping is the most important skill you can have at this counter. You gotta make it look like glass. "The glass effect!' I invented that." The next thing I knew he was off tending to another matter at the espresso bar, responding to his uncanny, almost bionic, imperfection radar.

I decided to let the unfortunate Saran intervention roll off my back and refocus on my original mission: to master the cheeses in all of their delicious, subtle, nutty, creamy, full-flavor splendor. With a little help from my new friends, I learned to distinguish between the various French Basque sheep's-milk varieties, and what made those hard-to-get unpasteurized cheeses worth all the fuss. I became proficient (and downright cocky) at determining a Stilton's ripeness by assessing its color and texture. Soon I could rattle off the perfect assortment of dessert cheeses with my eyes closed.

As my cheese education progressed, I became intrigued by the seeming appropriateness of the cheeses each customer selected. As dogs often resemble their owners, cheese choosers reveal themselves in their selections. Before long, I was in one to two tries able to deduce the cheese a customer would die over (not including persons who are intimidated into buying the first thing you sample them).

Of course many shoppers, I found, had neither the need nor the desire for advice. Demi-cheese mondaines, in their polite disregard for your dairy drivel, can reduce you to Thumbelina size. Take Lauren Hutton, for instance, whom I watched skillfully determine the ripeness of Parmigiano Reggiano by scrutinizing the crunchy age crystals; or Laurie Anderson, who rattled off an impressive order of the triple-creme Explorateur, Manchego, a tarragon- and thyme-crusted goat's-milk cheese called Tomme Fleur Verte, and the scarce Colston Basset Stilton ... and who sweetly but swiftly rejected my suggestion for a fifth selection. And then there are the incognito A- and B-models who, despite never having consumed dairy products, attempt to forge some semblance of domesticity in their otherwise hectic club-going lives. They saunter through the aisles like giraffes, filling dwarfed shopping carts with bouquets of roughage and perhaps a chunk of Leerdammer Lite for company. And finally, of course, you have your Cruella de Ville types with mink-lined hats and blood red lipstick who arrive in full Technicolor splendor at 10 a.m. for their well-rehearsed cheese-platter requests: Reblochon, Blue d'Auvergne, Old Amsterdam aged gouda, Le Chevrot.