The Best Grocery Store in America is Wegmans

This is the second in a series of articles (love letters?) by food writers who are passionate about where they buy their bananas.Read the entire series here.

The best grocery store in America is Wegmans.

It's proven: This year, Wegmans captured the top spot as the country's best grocery store in Market Force Information'sannual survey of 10,000 consumers. It beat out Publix and Trader Joe's—the first time in four years that T.J.'s did not rank first.

According to Market Force, Wegmans won for its "fresh produce, reasonable prices and massive stores." Fair enough. But that doesn't tell the whole story.

Wegmans is like the best of Frank Sinatra’s albums: big and lush, yet somehow also small and personal. I first encountered one in Rochester, NY (where the company was founded a century ago) in the late 1990s. I walked its vast aisles of quality foods in a daze, marveling at the scent of freshly ground coffee mingling with artisanal bread.

A decade later, I often split up my frequent drives between my base in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and the headquarters of my then-employer, the New York Times, by detouring to State College, PA—not to visit the Penn State campus, but to shop. Shop for groceries. At Wegmans.

Now, in Boston, I can go to Wegmans any time I want. I’ve heard people gasp when I tell them I shop there. “You have aWegmans?” they exclaim.

Yes I do. And to me, Wegmans can be summed up in two offerings: lobster macaroni and cheese, and blood orange juice.

I couldn’t bring myself to buy the former when I first spotted it in my Wegmans in Chestnut Hill, a quick trip from the neighborhood in Boston where I now live. It was ten dollars.Ten dollars. That might seem cheap compared with restaurant prices, but at a grocery store? Let's just say I dined frequently in college on blue boxes of Kraft mac and cheese—and they were a dollar each (on sale).

One rainy weekend, I broke down, however, and added a package to my cart. After carefully heating it up at home, I took a taste, and was enthralled. The lobster was succulent. The pasta had the perfect coating of creamy sauce. And that ten dollar package? Turns out it held two servings, which satisfied my Michigan thriftiness.

Then, there was my blood orange encounter. I’ve loved the tart, rich taste ever since I first tried it in theViktualienmarktin Munich. But blood oranges have a short season, cost more than regular oranges, and many stores don’t bother to juice them.

Fifty years ago, this would have been me. (The lobster mac would probably have been cheaper then.)

Photo courtesy of Wegmans

So I was delighted to find blood orange in the Wegmans case of fresh juices, squeezed every day, gleaming deep red among the pastel colors of grapefruit and ordinary orange.

Blood orange juice is to be savored, not gulped, so I usually take home just a small size. But on this afternoon, I was distressed to find only quarts. A Wegmans clerk instantly offered to find me a more-petite jug.

She looked in a nearby storage fridge: nothing. She raced to the back of the store: nada.

So, after getting her manager’s approval, she decanted a bigger jug into a pint container, sealed it, and presented it with the utmost care, like a florist handing over a bouquet. I almost wept.

And on one trip, I actually did tear up. There, in the smoked salmon case (yes, they have one) was a package bearing the name Charlie Trotter, the late Chicago chef both loved and feared. Wegmans is among a few stores that feature a last product from his repertoire.

“Charlie,” I murmured, feeling my eyes grow wet with memories of meals possible only on pay day. It was a link from my fabulous food past to my wonderful Wegmans present.