Tribeca’s newest gourmet grocer, Meadow Lane, has everything one of its neighbors might desire: Dog treats made from dehydrated bone broth. Hanger-steak breakfast burritos on Caramelo tortillas. A smoothie bar with a pre-patinaed bronze menu. Pacifying interiors of light wood and chocolate-brown tile. Chicken tenders breaded with gluten-free panko and fried without seed oil. An entire room dedicated to artful floral arrangements. Hormone-free caviar from sturgeons who had, according to Meadow Lane’s owner, “beautiful lives in the reservoirs.” Kale chips flavored with yuzu and nutritional yeast. Its own custom Caffè Panna flavors. Grapes from Japan.
There’s only one issue: You can’t buy any of it yet.
“No one wants this to open more than me,” contends the store’s founder, Sammy Nussdorf. Now — 430-plus days, several permitting snafus, and nearly 700 TikTok posts into this endeavor — he says he is mere weeks from unlocking the doors, having passed his Con Ed inspection and gotten the gas turned on. The 28-year-old has been posting through it all as @brokebackcontessa, amassing more than 126,000 followers documenting taste tests and the tribulations of opening a retail space in New York. Most videos begin with a refrain that has become TikTok canon: “I’m opening a gourmet grocer in Tribeca.”
The idea for Meadow Lane first came to Nussdorf six years ago, when he learned of Dean & DeLuca’s closure. That kernel of inspiration calcified into his vision after a stint with a florist in Los Angeles. But he swears he only began to post about it on TikTok in mid-2024, after a few underwhelming interviews with marketing agencies. He never thought he’d still be making videos about opening preparations. “I was like, People are going to get annoyed. This is not a part of my vision board,” he says. “How long am I going to keep talking about this on TikTok?”
The delays will be familiar to anyone who has tried opening a business in New York: Nussdorf signed the lease a year and a half ago but couldn’t get construction permits until this past winter owing to open TCO violations. Finally, his team was able to renovate. They completed the build-out in June. But “it’s been any day for me for four months,” he says. Once the renovation was complete, Nussdorf had to get the gas turned on, a process that involved marching down to Con Ed’s offices in person and finally, last week, an inspection.
Some followers have been happy to watch the saga unfurl. Others have cried “Fyre Fest.”
“It’s become more of a cultural moment than a store,” says Emily Holtzman, who late last month posted her analysis on TikTok: “my niche nyc hot take du jour is that I think meadow lane exists only in our imaginations. A bored billionaire’s ruse to see how a trendy idea could run rampant through FYPs.”
Holtzman expanded on this over the phone: “Meadow Lane exists in some way; there is a brick-and-mortar presence. There is photo evidence of it existing,” she says. “But this whole cat-and-mouse chase: When will it open to the public? When will the food that’s been staged for months hit grocery bags? That’s the ruse. Is Meadow Lane just performance art?”
Like any good marketer, Nussdorf has leaned into the controversy, reposting speculation, referencing Anna Delvey, and revising his catchphrase to “I am allegedly opening the gourmet grocer in Tribeca.” This summer, he posted, “Doing my daily check in on Meadow Lane to make sure we’re still grossly delayed and over budget,” alongside video footage of the cream-colored doors to his storefront. “Wait this is real? I thought it was a joke the whole time,” replied one commenter.
The store is real, a T-bone’s throw away from Beefbar and Locanda Verde. Sarah Carpenter — the studio has designed Talea outposts and the restaurant Massara, among other projects — worked on the interiors, which include water-resistant wood-paneled walls and decorative artwork involving Cheerios. Nussdorf hired an executive chef and a culinary director, who developed the recipes for various prepared foods, including a “Gravalox Sando” on pumpernickel bread that is surprisingly light with thin-sliced onion, herby cream cheese that tastes of tarragon, and a nest of sprout salad. Crab salad is flavored with Aleppo pepper, lime zest, and yuzu kosho. A sandwich called “the French” has just the right amount of jambon de Bayonne, Dijonnaise, brown butter, generous shavings of Comté, and thinly shingled cornichons. The house green juice has parsley, and, weirdly, it works.
In an era when dinner for two at a low-key trattoria can easily top $500, demand for status groceries has never been higher — even if this city has never been wanting for sophisticated provisions. Well before the advent of social media, Citarella’s baked-salmon spread and Dean & DeLuca’s sun-dried tomatoes gave rise to what Ginia Bellafante termed “bohemian consumerism.” But this new wave offers something even hypier for the digital age — protein fro-yo, chicken salad that signals familiarity with Round Swamp Farm in the Hamptons — as the cost to dine out is up 35 percent since 2019. Since the pandemic, lower Manhattan alone has seen an influx of crowded, high-end prepared-food shops such as Rigor Hill Market, Soho’s SunLife Organics, and Happier Grocery, which Ssense called New York Fashion’s Favorite Grocery Store.
“There’s something about a curated food store that excites me — I like making a trip out of it, an adventure for the day,” says Chloe Carlino, who lives close to Meadow Lane and does believe it will open one day. “I hate a suburban grocery store. I went into a Whole Foods in New Jersey and had a panic attack.”
Meadow Lane has also inspired threads of Redditors who decry the whole operation, and rabid customers who squabble in the comments section of TikTok videos about its offerings. (On one about an upscale Uncrustable, made with nut butter from a Brussels atelier, one follower wrote, “These would SMACK after a day of skiing in Aspen”). The store’s long road to opening was so thoroughly documented online that it inspired theories it was never intended to open in the first place, that it existed as a bit, perhaps to build clout for Nussdorf.
Nussdorf, who was raised in Manhattan, says he’s funding his project with his own savings from years spent investing in venture capital on behalf of his family office. (Nussdorf’s father turned a family business into a massive distribution company for health, beauty, and household essentials; Forbes listed the family’s net worth at $1.6 billion as of 2014.) The words “Meadow Lane” remind fans and haters alike that his family home is nestled on the famous Hamptons enclave, though Nussdorf says he chose it as a name in spite of that rather than because of it. Nussdorf is forthcoming about his background and says privilege should not preclude him from building his own business. “I know plenty of people who invest their family money, but it goes in the garbage,” he says. “Just because you have resources doesn’t mean you know how to invest money or that you’re going to do it successfully and have a healthy exit and return.”
Despite sending Bethenny Frankel the leek-horseradish chicken salad to review on-camera (and despite his own prolific posting habit), Nussdorf says he doesn’t want Meadow Lane to be a store for influencers. “It’s for the people of New York,” he says. To prove it, he has priced a handful of prepared food items below $15 to make them affordable for people in the neighborhood, at least one of whom walked by the store about a month ago and noticed Meadow Lane’s shelves were fully stocked for a photo shoot. “I still think it could be performance art,” Holtzman says. “Maybe even more so.”
