Dean and Deluca

In St. Helena next to Press, which is a fantastic restaurant where we ate on the patio last trip is a little market called Dean and Deluca. It’s nothing like any market you’ve ever seen before. When you walk in the door, they have a nice variety of local produce, which is good to start with and they have things like a (???) by the town and you can buy one or two (???). Their meat selection has things in it like wild boar, (???) and wild boar sausage and things like duck sausage. They have a beautiful set of baked goods out and one of the things my wife loves to buy there are these crackers that are imported from Spain that have aniseed in them called “Torta De Asete”. Then in the back they have a gorgeous deli where we just got a roasted beet salad that also has orange peel, onions and blue cheese in it.

Although we haven’t tried the baked goods yet, they looked world class. They looked unbelievably beautiful. They also have a coffee shop that my wife says has great coffee. I went to the cheese department, which is my favorite section of any gourmet store. The guy who worked there was very generous and gave me samples that were so big, I almost got (???) just tasting the samples. My biggest disagreement with all cheese stores that is the minimum they sell, even if I asked them for the smallest possible amount, is still about the quarter pound of cheese. I like to try lots of different cheese so I wish I could walk into a gourmet store and they would sell me 20 different ones that were a 1/10 of a pound each or maybe even less than that - maybe 1/20 of a pound. We also bought an unbelievably good curry chicken salad that had so much flavor I thought it was about to explode out of the container. An excellent (???) to the day?