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\n Photo-Illustration: Grub Street; Photos: Brianna Balducci (Meadow Lane); Alamy; Courtesy of the subjects (remaining)\n <\/p>\n
I am standing in the Long Island City commissary kitchen for the Upper East Side grocery sensation Butterfield Market<\/a>, facing an unfathomable quantity of chicken. There is chicken rubbed with herbs and heaped in trays the size of sleds. There are marinating chicken breasts in plastic vats, chicken breasts browning on griddles, chicken breasts charring on giant grills, chicken breasts destined to be sliced into coconut-coated fingers. There are racks of cooling chicken breasts \u2014 parmesan-crusted chicken breasts, chicken breasts seasoned with oregano \u2014\u00a0and silver bowls as big as manhole covers where shredded chicken breasts at this very moment are in the process of becoming chicken salad. \u201cThis is where we get our deliveries,\u201d says Butterfield\u2019s executive chef, Jorge Flores, gesturing toward a conveyor belt. \u201cOne thousand pounds of chicken!\u201d A week? No, he corrects me quickly. \u201cA day.\u201d<\/p>\n The demand has never been higher. The walk-in refrigerators are lined with juices squeezed fresh daily and still-setting chocolate tarts, finished salmon steaks and par-boiled fingerling potatoes waiting to be steamed, and tubs of gemelli, which will, later today, be mixed with cauliflower and caramelized onions and divided into neat pint-size containers for one of six daily deliveries uptown. Until last October, it\u2019d managed some version of this from a 2,000-square-foot kitchen on East 92nd, but that had gone from tight to unsustainable. That building is now the kitchen and storefront\u00a0for Goop Kitchen<\/a>, Gwyneth Paltrow\u2019s \u201cmade-to-order delivery\u201d shop, while Butterfield\u2019s kitchen footprint moved to Queens and quintupled. The new space still isn\u2019t enough: It just signed a lease for the garage upstairs. \u201cNow we have more warehouse space for dry goods,\u201d explains Joelle Obsatz, a third-generation co-owner who heads up Butterfield\u2019s marketing, pointing at what seems to me to already be a robust amount of bagged farro. \u201cThis looks like a lot to her!\u201d Obsatz informs Flores, who has just reappeared with a container of newly revamped overnight oats for testing. People could make their own overnight oats \u2014 the whole point of overnight oats is that rather than cooking them, you mix milk and maybe yogurt with raw oats and then go to bed \u2014 but they do not want to. So Flores does it for them.<\/p>\n A lot of people love food; that doesn\u2019t mean they want to cook it. And even when they do, they\u2019re busy, and dinner is every single night. Across the nation, more people have more access to more flavors than ever, and their preferences keep getting more sophisticated. But this fact is not reflected by any improvement in their collective cooking skills. Much of Butterfield\u2019s value proposition is: What if there were no logistics, and food simply appeared? And \u2014 here is the other twist, the twist that differentiates it from Hungry-Man and Soylent and Trader Joe\u2019s and microwave burritos and frozen pizzas\u00a0\u2014 what if it was fresh? What if it wasn\u2019t just a shortcut but in fact a pleasure?<\/p>\n The deli case at Butterfield is overflowing with beautiful fresh things made more appealing by their abundance: plates of cedar plank salmon, heaps of broccoli with frizzled garlic, mountains of roasted cauliflower (also available prepacked for your convenience), bright rows of Thai quinoa salad lined up next to Mandarin chicken salad next to beets and ch\u00e8vre over greens. About 40 percent of Butterfield\u2019s business is now prepared foods \u2014 by far the market\u2019s biggest section \u2014 and that doesn\u2019t include the sushi bar, which accounts for another 8.25 percent. If you add in the frozen yogurt (6.5 percent) and the smoothie bar (2 percent), you\u2019re well past half, and that\u2019s excluding the spread of breakfast pastries, which are lumped into the more general \u201cbakery and breads.\u201d\u00a0And the public\u2019s appetite is only growing. \u201cWe\u2019re prepping to open another store,\u201d she tells me. The plan, right now, is Soho.<\/p>\n Groceries are a famously low-margin business, and, at the moment, things are particularly tough. Shoppers are buying fewer groceries overall,\u00a0says Bill Aull, a partner at McKinsey, and co-author of this year\u2019s State of Grocery report<\/a>; the growth \u2014 a percentage point or two for the whole sector \u2014 has largely come from raising prices. Prepared foods are the exception. Trips to the store are down, but trips specifically to buy prepared meals are up 9 percent over a year. \u201cI mean, you don\u2019t see many categories where you see household penetration growth like that,\u201d Aull says. \u201cIt\u2019s not just the same people doing more trips \u2014 it\u2019s expansion.\u201d No one seemed to have any New York\u2013specific prepared-foods data, but the city\u2019s retail landscape hints at any even greater shift.<\/p>\n In the past few years, the prepared-food options here seem to have multiplied, popping up across the city like organic chanterelles. In addition to the expanding Butterfield, which has recently transformed from purveyor of $13.99 Driscoll\u2019s organic blueberries to perpetual TikTok sensation, there is now Meadow Lane (spalike, famous for chicken fingers), which is just down the street from the farm-to-table Rigor Hill Market, the grab-and-go outpost of the restaurant One White Street. Ouri\u2019s Markets, the \u201cKosher Erewhon of New York City<\/a>,\u201d is known for both its social scene (\u201cbougie Upper East Side teens,\u201d according<\/a> to the New York Post) and its prices, which, one superfan assured me, are justified. \u201cOuri\u2019s is heaven,\u201d he said, wistfully describing split-pea soup. This spring, Gwyneth Paltrow\u2019s aforementioned \u201cdelivery-first\u201d meal solution Goop Kitchen began its conquest of the city, catering to aspiring Californians with office jobs. Happier Grocery<\/a> is for the wellness-focused, tallow-curious downtown art world; H. Valley, which opened this month in the West Village, features, in addition to a spectacular array of human options, housemade meals for dogs.<\/p>\n Brownstone Brooklyn, a hotbed of progressive domesticity and artisanal jam, has been somewhat slow on the uptake, barring the longstanding prepared players (Union Market, Bklyn Larder, Sahadi\u2019s). But even there, where residents seem to have higher tolerance for inconvenience, you can see hints of the prepared-food lifestyle taking hold. The virtuously crunchy Park Slope Food Coop has added a second refrigerator case<\/a> dedicated to grab-and-go entr\u00e9es and sides. This spring, a few blocks from Barclays Center, Good Girl set up shop, offering an ever-changing menu of weekday dinners with a family-friendly tilt for pickup or bicycle delivery.<\/p>\n The promise of these prepared-food shops is not only dinner but a community \u2014 a \u201cthird place,\u201d even \u2014\u00a0and a supremely photogenic lifestyle. Not a restaurant, and not a grocery store, but a gourmet cafeteria that doubles as your personal town square. People come for coffee in the morning, return for lunch, and grab dinner on the way home. The same customers stop in two, three, four times a day; they stock their fridges with towers of adventurous prepackaged dinners and outsource their nutritionally superior morning oats, and they don\u2019t even have to feel bad about it. It\u2019s homemade-ish. It\u2019s not DoorDash.<\/p>\n There was a time, not all that long ago, when delivery apps were exciting \u2014 pretty much any food, from anywhere, delivered to your door courtesy of Grubhub or DoorDash or Uber Eats, and all you had to do was tip. Somebody was paying for it, but it wasn\u2019t you, until suddenly, it was. The VC subsidies that kept prices artificially low began to dry up, and sometime around 2023, delivery fees began \u201ceclipsing the cost of actual food,\u201d noted<\/a> Kevin T. Dugan in this magazine that winter, charting the shift: A Park Slope Chinese-food order that had been $28 in May 2022 had become $52 in the course of a year. A $17.95 chicken-and-rice bowl with chips from Chipotle was up to $32.06 including tip. There were delivery fees now, and service fees, on top of tax and tip. New minimum-wage laws for the city\u2019s delivery workers had brought the baseline hourly rate up to $19.96 (now $22.13), a substantial improvement, though the apps had been against it: What choice did they have but to pass the difference on to consumers?\u00a0By spring of 2024, fees had gone up 58 percent, according to one city agency report<\/a>. Meanwhile, the apps also could increase the cut they took from restaurants \u2014\u00a0legally, up to 43 percent<\/a> of each order in New York City \u2014 and, already squeezed, some restaurants began to pass on at least some of the cost to the price of their food.<\/p>\n It\u2019s unseemly to complain about any of this, as any number of people on the internet will tell you<\/a>. Oh, you\u2019re sad because it costs too much to hire a private taxi for your burrito? But while there is still plenty of delivery, more delivery than ever, the mood has shifted. You can still have your luxury burrito, but you should feel a little bad. (Last week, DoorDash agreed to a $131.5 million settlement<\/a> with the city for shorting workers.) \u201cThe vibes are turning against delivery,\u201d says Priya Fielding-Singh, a sociologist at George Washington University\u2019s Global Food Institute who studies how American families eat. While people are still ordering, lately, David Portalatin, a food-service-industry expert at the market-research firm Circana, told me, \u201cgrowth in delivery has kind of slowed down.\u201d \u201cWhat I do is, I lie in bed and I look at menus, like, Oh, this all looks so really good, let me put it all in my cart,\u201d Caroline Means, a 30-year-old graphic designer in Bed-Stuy, tells me. \u201cAnd then I look at the delivery and the fees.\u201d And once you think about it that way, a $16.75 brown-rice salmon poke bowl from Butterfield seems like a bargain, and half a San Marzano roast chicken ($6.99 at Agata & Valentina) seems downright cheap. For years, Means forced herself to cook \u2014 dutifully, responsibly \u2014 until she was saved by a new job across the street from the Korean megamarket H Mart: Now dinner is microwave sticky rice with a couple ready-to-eat sides.<\/p>\n \u201cTakeout now has taken on a new meaning,\u201d said Ruth Spear, enthusiastically, in the 1977 pages of this magazine, cataloguing<\/a> rising interest in prepared food and the \u201clarge \u2014 and growing\u201d crop of \u201csophisticated\u201d spots where you could pick up a quick veal marengo, a whole Venetian chicken, a poached-shrimp salad, a pound of vinaigrette-dressed green beans with \u201cjust the right degree of crunch.\u201d They weren\u2019t limited to any single neighborhood. Dean & DeLuca had just opened in Soho. Greenwich Village had Balducci. The Silver Palate was becoming an Upper West Side staple, catering to the emerging population of working women who had money but not time. By the early \u201990s, Citarella was in on it. \u201cWhat happened was, I happened to be quite ambitious,\u201d owner Joe Gurrera says of his start in the business, seeming less interested in the sociological forces driving demand for ready-made roulade than on the resulting growth. You still got the gourmand, but now you also had the non-cook, the sometimes-cook, and the cook who is very, very tired. In 2001, another milestone: the city\u2019s first Whole Foods hot bar.<\/p>\n \u201cI think it comes down to the marketing, and, frankly, the aesthetics,\u201d says Casey Malone, better known as @CaseysHappyHealthy, a 28-year-old wellness influencer with 46,000 followers on TikTok. She is a regular at Meadow Lane<\/a> \u2014 founded by Sammy Nussdorf, himself a perpetual social-media presence (@BrokebackContessa, 161,800 followers) \u2014 and will occasionally post about her hauls. (She likes the turkey pinwheels.) \u201cI think that if any random grocery store in the city redid their floors and got some better lighting and put cool art on the walls and stuck some tables outside,\u201d she offers, \u201cit would be a pretty successful rebrand.\u201d<\/p>\n Everyone has a theory about the prepared-food surge. It\u2019s wellness culture; it\u2019s the economy; it\u2019s work habits. It\u2019s frustration with restaurants. (\u201cPeople, in my opinion, are tired of restaurants,\u201d Phil Lempert<\/a>, a grocery-industry analyst, told me, though I hadn\u2019t mentioned them. \u201cIt\u2019s not a pleasurable experience the way it was, whether it\u2019s because of bad service, high prices, smaller portions, whatever.\u201d) It\u2019s mass sobriety. \u201cThere\u2019s a perceived sense of health around prepared foods,\u201d says Suzanne Dumaine, one-half of the meal-delivery service Stocked<\/a>. Whether or not it\u2019s true, it feels true, which is the important thing. There\u2019s also the indulgence factor, and as Elizabeth Chubbuck, chief strategy officer at Murray\u2019s Cheese<\/a>, tells me, \u201cIndulgent doesn\u2019t necessarily mean caloric.\u201d At Murray\u2019s, prepared-food sales \u2014 chicken parm, lasagna, infinite varieties\u00a0of mac and cheese \u2014 were up 31 percent year over year in June. Instead, the indulgence can be the cost, which is both high and less than any other \u201cluxury\u201d like it. \u201cThese places give people a glimpse into the life of somebody who has access to over-the-top expensive places, like the Hamptons, or a super-wealthy neighborhood in Los Angeles, through a $27 salad,\u201d theorizes Malone. And if nothing else, prepared food is a reason to leave the house. \u201cI go to these places for the same reason that I go out to get a coffee even though I have an espresso machine,\u201d she says. \u201cLike, it\u2019s something to do.\u201d<\/p>\n Portalatin, the Circana analyst, points to less romantic factors behind the growth. During the pandemic, \u201cwhen we were all working from home,\u201d he says, \u201cwe embraced technology to be on 24\/7,\u201d and now, though commutes are back, the expectations on work haven\u2019t really changed. \u201cThat disrupts our rhythms. We need convenience.\u201d\u00a0For example, a rotisserie chicken over pilaf with a side of wax-bean salad from Rigor Hill.<\/p>\n I truly believe that to make everything right, from scratch, you will end up paying more money.<\/p>\n \u201cIf somebody in the family craves chicken salad,\u201d Masha Buklen, a former pianist, is explaining to me on the phone, \u201cwe want chicken salad from Butterfield Market, and there is no other place we want chicken salad from.\u201d After 35 years on the Upper East Side, she knows things, such as: For the best beet salad, you have to go to Citarella<\/a>, which is also her preference for poached salmon, but the seafood salad is superior a few blocks south at Grace\u2019s Marketplace<\/a>. Eli\u2019s Market <\/a>has become \u201cabsolutely, insanely, ridiculously, unjustifiably overpriced\u201d in the past several years, in her opinion, but still remains the only reasonable option for holiday catering. The neighborhood\u2019s best gazpacho comes from Breads Bakery<\/a>. She could roast a duck herself (\u201cI\u2019m not a horrible cook!\u201d) but why, when Agata & Valentina<\/a> does it better, and potentially for less? \u201cI could be wrong, but I truly believe that to make everything right, from scratch, you will end up paying more money. And then you spend your time.\u201d A lot of people, she understands, think certain dishes are just better if you make them yourself, but she contends those people are underestimating the \u201cskill issue.\u201d More than half of the meals she eats at home come prepacked from specialty grocers. You simply have to know which places are best at what.<\/p>\n Cheaper is a wild selling point. (A container of white jasmine rice with peas at Butterfield Market: $10.49.) But it\u2019s true that efficient home cooking requires planning, shopping, some modicum of either skill or interest, a pantry already stocked with basics, a family in agreement about what and how to eat, and a certain tolerance for boredom. Prepared food demands nothing. \u201cI know that there\u2019s going to be no waste, and I know I\u2019m just buying exactly what I need,\u201d a Butterfield regular in her early 30s tells me; given that she\u2019d \u201cbe buying top-quality ingredients anyway,\u201d she\u2019s pretty sure the $175 or so she spends there weekly on food and her morning coffee in fact puts her ahead.<\/p>\n Somewhere near the fresh ravioli on the floor of Citarella, I\u2019d asked Gurrera what his customers would be doing for dinner if they weren\u2019t here \u2014 going to a restaurant? A grocery store? Getting takeout? \u201cI don\u2019t think,\u201d he quipped, with an air of vague annoyance, \u201cthey\u2019d be going to a grocery store.\u201d<\/p>\n Perhaps they wouldn\u2019t be going anywhere at all. For most of her career, Dumaine, the co-founder of Stocked, has been focused on the same fundamental problem: How do you feed a family, and feel good about it, without it draining your time?\u00a0She worked at the meal-kit company Plated, when everyone was very excited about meal kits, but ultimately determined they weren\u2019t the answer \u2014 the subscription model was too rigid, and the meals took too long. \u201cYou just want to be able to open the fridge and feel like you have stuff that works,\u201d she says with a sigh. The goal is not just ease but infinite flexibility. If Plated was supposed to sell you on cooking, Stocked is an introduction to letting it go. Everybody can eat the same thing or not. You can use the dishes as components of a meal or the whole thing. You might, for example, order the Thai-style beef lettuce wraps ($44) but also \u2014 should your kid object \u2014 the naked chicken meatballs ($26), and use the grilled balsamic chicken as a component of your lunches ($22), and graze on chile-roasted delicata squash ($12) or fingerling potatoes ($10) or Korean veggie cakes ($18), which together could be dinner. Unlike restaurant takeout, everything is specifically designed and packed to last in the refrigerator. This is crucial, because not all cooked food adapts well to the fridge. As Citarella\u2019s Gurrera, will tell you, \u201cI can\u2019t dress something refrigerated with olive oil because it\u2019s going to coagulate, so it\u2019s going to look like shit!\u201d With Stocked and Citarella and Butterfield Market and Agata & Valentina and all the others, you are buying more than dinner. In a series of\u00a0clear plastic containers, you get a blissful sense of calm.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is New York! Nobody wants to be cooking in their apartment,\u201d a well-dressed woman of a certain age sitting on the benches outside Butterfield Market\u2019s Madison Avenue location told me. Her name was Nina, and she was grazing on smoked salmon and in an animated conversation with a contoured 22-year-old on her lunch break. \u201cAnyway,\u201d Nina said, \u201cMy stove turned off.\u201d Later, on the phone, an Upper East Side mom of three named Kelsey Martin told me about her devotion to Agata & Valentina on 79th and First Avenue, which is essentially an outpost of her kitchen. \u201cWe\u2019re there every day,\u201d she says. \u201cThey\u2019ve literally got anything.\u201d Last night, for dinner: broccoli, beets, and sweet potatoes, some kind of pasta, a rotisserie chicken, all Agata. Her family likes the sushi, the clam chowder, the chicken tortilla, the chicken marsala. Agata is responsible for the majority of their meals.<\/p>\n It isn\u2019t true, of course, that nobody cooks. This is a city with at least four different cookbook-only bookstores, snaking lines at the farmers\u2019 markets, specialty grocers of all kinds. For years, Blue Apron boxes piled up in package rooms; during the first months of the pandemic, New Yorkers were as obsessed with homemade sourdough as anybody else. I know this because I cook, mostly because it is one of my relatively few skills. My working mother cooked, and her working mother cooked, and I have never successfully divested myself from the belief that whatever takes the most effort is morally good. I like projects. I am pathologically cheap, but, I like to think, in a plucky sort of way. There are people, obviously, whose identity is not wrapped up in their commitment to roasting their own (excellent) fingerling potatoes, but I am not among them. Prepared food, I have long assumed, is simply not for me. Also, perhaps relatedly, I am in a perpetual state of low-grade dinner panic, which only sometimes progresses into rage.<\/p>\n I decide to try the prepared-food lifestyle in my own neighborhood, placing an order with Good Girl<\/a> for the next Wednesday. I purchase a greens-and-green-bean salad with shallot-lime vinaigrette, Thai tofu stir-fry, eggplant with basil, and jasmine rice, which I\u2019ll pick up sometime between 3 and 7 p.m. It costs me $79, not including tip. The day had been terrible, and I\u2019d spent much of it crying. \u201cHow convenient,\u201d I kept thinking, \u201cthat I thought to order dinner!\u201d The order was lighter than restaurant food, less salty, milder. The peanut sauce was exceptional. The eggplant was fine. It felt good, eating it, which I did again the next two days for lunch.<\/p>\n Another afternoon, this one miserably hot, I stopped at a fancy Brooklyn grocery store, where, until now, I\u2019d been mostly for free samples. \u201cI\u2019m picking up dinner!\u201d I told my husband, several times. This was interesting because our usual late-afternoon ritual is to text in an increasing state of agitation (mine) about what I could make, what ingredients we do or do not have, and whether someone needs to stop at the co-op. Now I purchased several slabs of miso-crusted tofu, two small tubs of cold soba-noodle salad, and a half-pound of green beans with garlic, which seemed to more or less exhaust the shop\u2019s vegan options. Everybody hated all of it. \u201cI think the green beans are okay?\u201d I told my husband. \u201cThey\u2019re green beans,\u201d he said. My daughter ate a bagel. No one except me really cared. Skill issue, I thought, and promised it would be better next time, which it was. At Citarella, I bought a pound of fresh cavatelli, a pint of fra diavolo sauce, and a meaty-looking pair of portobello-mushroom burgers, which I prepared at home by heating them in the toaster oven: $35. This felt wildly extravagant,\u00a0but compared to takeout, it was thrifty. (Pickup for three kale-and-hominy burritos at the place by my apartment: $61.42 with tip.) Our meal had a reasonable air of wholesomeness; it tasted like food. But it required no thinking and no planning \u2014 I\u2019d walked in and I\u2019d bought it. We\u2019d eaten. We could move on. The freedom was unsettling. I organized a closet.<\/p>\n It was becoming clear, however, that my particular food purchases were not representative. When I asked people what they liked, they talked about the chicken, except when they talked about salmon, duck, or brisket. To really understand the virtues of the prepared-food lifestyle, it seemed, you had to order meat. People were making pilgrimages for roast chickens \u2014 of course they were, it\u2019s a whole thing, roasting a chicken. I\u2019ve been to weddings and on airplanes; I understand how the world views vegetarians. And so, against my principles, I recruited a carnivorous friend and her apartment and arrived with a medieval feast. Half an organic roast chicken from Agata (I went with \u201cspicy,\u201d though I could have gone \u201cMoroccan\u201d) and, from Butterfield, cedar-plank salmon, a crab cake, a container of the famous chicken salad, and the coconut chicken strips, because I heard the man next to me tell his girlfriend they were \u201cbomb!\u201d\u00a0In the interest of balance, I also bought \u2014 between the two stores \u2014 vegan ravioli, saut\u00e9ed spinach with mushrooms, Italian gigante beans, a slice of tomato focaccia, a half-pint of pasta al pesto, and the Thai quinoa salad developed with the influencer @Healthfulradience. In this process, I realized I had no idea what constituted a meal. I found it difficult to develop any sort of concept, which bothered me. Instead, I had several bags full of plastic containers, and, I discovered on the train, chicken juice soaking through my pants. (Skill issue.)<\/p>\n The coconut chicken fingers were, in fact, bomb. The saut\u00e9ed spinach, which I\u2019d hoped would be a rip-off, was infuriatingly good. The gigante beans had a sweetness I found sickening. I still preferred my own cooking, which is hot and tailored to my own specific tastes. On the other hand, my refrigerator was lined with neat, cheerful containers, and, all week, I had snacks.<\/p>\n \u201cSo you\u2019ll come in here,\u201d Austin Johnson is explaining, gesturing toward the doorway of what used to be an Italian restaurant on Hudson Street but just soft-opened as H. Valley<\/a>, the latest addition to the prepared-foods landscape. In recent years, Johnson, formerly of both the restaurant One White Street <\/a>and the related grocery next door, Rigor Hill Market<\/a>, found his focus shifting. Markets were just more fun than restaurants, he noticed. You could really be part of the neighborhood, and the hours were more civilized. His idea with H. Valley is: Go even bigger. Triple the refrigeration. Tables for dining in.<\/p>\n He walks me through the new store: Here is the refrigerator case for juices and drinks and breakfasts (Honeycrisp juice, carrot-orange-ginger juice, more overnight oats) and one entirely for salads (tuna steak over steamed rice or soba with cabbage and sesame-soy vinaigrette, and hanger steak with avocado and pickled shallots), which is next to two cases devoted to the \u201cseasonal composed dishes,\u201d and another one dedicated to sauces, dips, and spreads. There will be stocks and broths and pastas, designated food for kids (mac and cheese) and food for dogs (trout with Brussels sprouts and apples). \u201cDogs,\u201d Johnson tells me, \u201care such a huge part of this business.\u201d There will be trifles, tiramisus, and ice creams made in-house. Dinner for four will be $70 or $80 bucks, he guesses: It will be $50 for the roast chicken with rice pilaf and a seasonal roasted vegetable, and then, \u201cYou do like, two sides.\u201d You won\u2019t have to plan it. You won\u2019t have to clean the kitchen when it\u2019s done.<\/p>\n What makes prepared foods feel special is that you can\u2019t get them just anywhere. But the options are undoubtedly multiplying. A few weeks ago, news broke<\/a> that a company linked to Happier Grocery \u2014 which is already confirmed to be opening a second store<\/a> on the Upper East Side next year \u2014\u00a0had bought a vacant former Rite Aid in Carroll Gardens. After Soho, Obsatz tells me, she anticipates that Butterfield will open a third and fourth location somewhere in the city, but that\u2019s it: \u201cWe\u2019d only open two more stores, period,\u201d she says. \u201cWe don\u2019t want to dilute what we do.\u201d At some point this fall, the food writer and chef Alison Roman, doyenne of chickpeas, will open<\/a>\u00a0a Brooklyn Heights outpost of her upstate provisions shop, First Bloom. Her focus? \u201cSeasonal home cooking that\u2019s better than the food you make at home.\u201d Meadow Lane, Nussdorf has said, is already working on a second store<\/a>, this one with a hot bar. And last week, of course, H. Valley opened its doors.<\/p>\n The refrigerator cases weren\u2019t fully stocked yet (no trifles, no dog food) when I visited, but, two days in, business appeared brisk. West Villagers sipped coffee, photographed salads, nibbled on yogurt parfaits. You could pick up an already-hot dinner of tamari-glazed steelhead trout with rice and squash ($24) or a generous portion of roast chicken over pilaf (also $24). The yuzu-spiked sweet corn polenta ($14) was emerging as a top seller. You could, as I did, buy a small bottle of apple juice pressed from a single cultivar (Honeycrisp, $11), a 12-ounce glass jar of granola studded with golden raisins ($16), an heirloom tomato salad ($22). The bakery was not yet up and running, but the children\u2019s corner, designed for discerning toddlers, was overflowing with freshly sharpened crayons. Already, a barista told me, she was recognizing regulars. The store was cozy and efficient, and I could imagine how it\u00a0could become a fixture in a daily routine \u2014 not my daily routine, necessarily, but someone\u2019s. Johnson sees big things ahead. \u201cWe\u2019ll sell over a million bucks of overnight oats,\u201d he\u2019d told me a few weeks prior. \u201cIt\u2019s crazy.\u201d I watched a series of men slurp fresh turkey chili as they leaned over the shop\u2019s high-top tables. It didn\u2019t seem impossible.<\/p>\n Related<\/p>\n