SWADDLED IN EXPENSIVE PARKAS and slinging luxury purses, a winding queue of patrons waits for the handsome bouncer to let them inside. It’s lunchtime on a freezing December day in Manhattan, and TikTok-pilled Gen Zers are patiently awaiting entry into a grocery store.
Tribeca’s Meadow Lane doesn’t deal in essentials. Shoppers are greeted by mood lighting, shiny pears and soft-beige shelves holding $15 glass bottles of oat milk, $15 chicken nuggets and $750 caviar.
“I love an expensive grocery store,” says Samantha Pearlstein, a 26-year-old sales engineer, as she browses $85 flower arrangements and $23 salads. “It’s an experience and it’s food, all together.” She tried to convince her boyfriend to tag along, but he declined, she says; the store’s concept was too “dystopian” for him.
Gen Zers and millennials are swimming in student debt and may never own homes, but they’re splurging on gut-healthy juices and rotisserie chickens. New York City as a whole is in the midst of an affordability crisis, one that helped elect Mayor Zohran Mamdani, yet a new crop of luxury prepared-food purveyors is drawing massive crowds in Manhattan and driving social-media discourse. Influencers fill aisles in search of trendy nut butters and overpriced salads. The stores are packed on weekends with teens who inhale frozen yogurt.
Business is booming. Can it last?
“I WANTED PEOPLE to feel like they just took a Xanax when they walk in,” Sammy Nussdorf says of the airy, polished Meadow Lane. His store, named after a luxe street in Southampton, opened in November, the conclusion of a two-year journey that he meticulously documented on TikTok. He taste-tested chicken salad recipes and jumped through hurdles for permits. He says he was inspired by farmers’ markets in Los Angeles and grab-and-go shops in the Hamptons—places that epitomized the current craze for all things healthy.
“Nightclubs in New York kind of died,” the 28-year-old New Yorker says. “The health and wellness sector is moving the needle.”
In downtown Manhattan, there’s Happier Grocery and Rigor Hill Market, both blocks away from Meadow Lane. Uptown is home to a bounty of longer-running spots including Butterfield Market, Agata & Valentina, Zabar’s and Ouri’s Market.
“I don’t think anybody competes with me,” says Eli Zabar, whose parents opened Zabar’s on the Upper West Side in the 1930s, when asked about the new arrivals. In 1973, Zabar struck out on his own, opening the E.A.T. food shop and cafe across town on the Upper East Side. He now has 12 markets and eateries throughout the city.
Nussdorf’s family owns Quality King Distributors, a major purveyor of wholesale household and beauty products founded in 1960. He says Meadow Lane is self-funded; after working in venture capital for five years, he “really wanted to feel more inspired” by his work. Nussdorf admits with a grin that haters aren’t wrong to call his store a “nepo baby passion project.”
The business’s operations have been profitable since week two, he says: “On average, over 1,000 tickets a day.”
Some visitors have critiqued his prices, but Nussdorf says they’re “right in line with every other grocery.”
“Is there a range from economy to first class, Toyota to Rolls-Royce? Yes,” he says. “Are people on food stamps coming to shop here? No.”
Shortly after Meadow Lane opened, customers posted online about undercooked chicken nuggets; another shopper, who was lactose intolerant, said that she’d bought chili topped with cheese that wasn’t on the list of ingredients.
“We made mistakes,” Nussdorf says. “All I could do was see what was happening, correct it as best as I knew how, which was profusely apologize, refund and credit their next shop here.”
Still, he worried no one would come back. “The next day,” he says, “the lines were longer.”
YOU CAN TRACE the roots of the new gourmet grocers back to Erewhon, which originally opened as a small health-food store in Boston in the 1960s. Around the same time, George Ohsawa’s book Zen Macrobiotics introduced to the West the concept of a macrobiotic diet, which hippies popularized. What began as a counterculture movement went mainstream, shaping an understanding of health and nutrition that still dominates American culture today.
Demand for whole, organic food propelled new businesses. Dean & DeLuca opened in New York’s SoHo neighborhood in 1977. Ina Garten bought the Hamptons specialty food store that became the Barefoot Contessa a year later. The first Whole Foods followed in Austin, Texas, in 1980.
Marion Nestle saw all of those shifts firsthand. “Every generation feels like all of a sudden food is becoming an enormously prominent issue like it never was before,” says the 89-year-old nutritionist and New York University professor emerita. “That happens over and over and over again. Whole Foods has always been called ‘Whole Paycheck.’ ”
Grocery stores have remarkably low profit margins, but the ones that can sell high volumes and minimize overhead tend to stick around. When Amazon acquired Whole Foods in 2017, it brought its deep pockets and vast delivery infrastructure to the business—though it still hasn’t increased its market share of the grocery industry to more than 4%. For smaller players, owning their real estate and means of production can be a boon. Dean & DeLuca closed its New York locations in 2019, facing steep debts, including unpaid rent.
Erewhon, meanwhile, is flourishing in Southern California, with 11 locations, celebrity fans and in-demand smoothies around $20. Last November, the company, privately owned by the Antoci family, opened its first East Coast “tonic bar” at Manhattan’s new private wellness club Kith Ivy.
New York’s new crop of gourmet markets borrows a bit from Erewhon’s DNA by targeting trendy Tiktokers, crunchy moms, MAHA-curious health fiends, Instacart devotees who pop in and pick up a few things to feel good. These stores are appealing to an “upscale, educated” population, says Nestle. “These are the healthiest people in the population.”
They also want shopping to feel like an experience. The family-owned Butterfield Market has been around since 1915. Lately it has been flooded with influencers and out-of-towners who come in “all dressed up to do a haul and taste-test everything,” says Alexa Matthews, the store’s marketing director. “It’s social currency.”
Happier Grocery, which opened in 2023 on Canal Street, where SoHo meets Tribeca, is a two-story bazaar with a beverage bar for smoothies, pastries and coffee; prepared foods; and a wide range of beauty and skin-care products.
“Everything is more expensive than one would realize,” says Wells Stellberger, Happier Grocery’s co-founder. “We want to be fair. We’re always battling and balancing.” He knows people may balk at $16 bottles of pumpkin milk. Even he sometimes finds the prices preposterous. “I’m like, ‘I can’t even imagine that costs that,’ but it does.”
AROUND THE CORNER from Meadow Lane, Rigor Hill Market is packed with professionals munching on $26 roasted cauliflower with farro-lentil salad and $23 short-rib lasagna. Lauren Reeves, a 32-year-old venture capitalist, grabs a $15 turkey and provolone sandwich.
“It’s expensive as hell to live in New York,” Reeves says. “But you figure out what you want to spend your money on. At the end of the day, I prioritize good food and good people.”
Ryan Sohn, Rigor Hill’s co-owner, opened the store in 2022 on the hunch that diners who eat at Michelin-star restaurants would also pay top dollar for takeaway. Sales have doubled since 2023, and the company is profitable. Sohn says the fast-casual concept is a much better model than running a restaurant, even if Rigor Hill has 41 employees and is open seven days a week. “Our general build-out costs and operating expenses are lower,” he says. Plus, the store is meeting a real consumer need.
“A lot of people come in for the rotisserie chicken and veggie sides, and that’s their dinner,” Sohn says. “People are busy; they don’t want to cook.”
That certainly seems to be true in the Hamptons, where the newly renovated Sagaponack General Store had
visitors lining up this summer for $13 breakfast sandwiches and $65 tote bags.
Mindy Gray, the philanthropist and wife of Blackstone President and COO Jon Gray, bought the historic market in 2020—an act, she says, of cultural preservation. She sees it as a kind of “town square,” where shoppers can have “mini playdates.”
Some early reports on Sagaponack General Store bemoaned it as another unaffordable shopping destination. Gray says her prices are fair for the area and that everything she stocks is highly intentional. She says that the organic chicken she sells from La Belle Farms in Sullivan County, New York, “tastes like chicken, in a time when so much chicken doesn’t taste like chicken.”
She hasn’t heard customers complain about costs, she says.
