Edible complex.

This year marks the 20th birthday of one of New York's most flavorful institutions -- the Vatican of Vichyssoise, the Pantheon of Porcini, the Alhambra of Arugula: Dean & Deluca. With "you eat with your eyes first" as its mantra, the store's carefully cultivated mystique has lured countless pilgrims into its 9,700-square-feet of converted SoHo loft space since founding fathers Giorgio Deluca, Joel Dean, and Jack Ceglac first set up shop at the comer of Broadway and Prince. But make no mistake, this is more than just an overpriced gourmet grocery. With its signature medley of marble slabs and crusty breads, stainless steel and Moroccan trout, wooden crates and runny Stiltons, Dean & Deluca has pioneered an overall aesthetic that is more lifestyle museum than mere food Mecca.

As a seasoned Dean & Deluca voyeur, I was familiar with the sophisticated, bespectacled grad-student type that worked the cheese counter. And so it was that, finding myself with time on my hands between writing gigs and a hankering for cheese knowledge, I recently filled out an application to join their ranks. The store manager was perplexed by my eclectic and oddly unrelated job experience (not to mention a lack of retail experience of any sort), but he was clearly desperate and hopeful enough to take a chance on my earnest demeanor and conspicuous passion for all things edible. A life-long student, I treated my new job like any other academic undertaking. I taught myself the basics, did some extracurricular reading, and asked a lot of questions.

The Glass Effect[TM]

I spent the first week on the back counter learning proper Dean & Deluca cheese-wrapping techniques. I took great pride in stretching the Saran wrap to the point of creaselessness. The key, I was told, was to cut the plastic just the right size -- excess Saran makes it difficult to achieve the necessary tension and too small a piece causes tears in the plastic, thus defeating the sealing function. It's one of those tricks of the trade that, once acquired, can be taken anywhere!

By day two, I was just starting to get the hang of it when suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I spied Giorgio Deluca -- aesthetic czar, foodie, and former history teacher -- across the marbled aisle. In the midst of his wildly gesticulative critique of the olive oil display, I could feel his eyes burning a hole into my novice cheese-wrapping hands. Uh-oh, he was heading toward me. With childlike logic, I reasoned that if our eyes didn't meet, he would somehow disappear. I assessed the unwrapped half-wheel of Pecorino Corsignano (a delightful aged Italian sheep's-milk cheese) and unrolled what I had calculated to be the proper amount of plastic. As I attempted to make the swift cut, his arrival broke my confident perforating stroke. The plastic began to pull and pucker. He nudged me aside and grabbed the cheese from my trembling hands, exclaiming, "Wrapping is the most important skill you can have at this counter. You gotta make it look like glass. "The glass effect!' I invented that." The next thing I knew he was off tending to another matter at the espresso bar, responding to his uncanny, almost bionic, imperfection radar.

I decided to let the unfortunate Saran intervention roll off my back and refocus on my original mission: to master the cheeses in all of their delicious, subtle, nutty, creamy, full-flavor splendor. With a little help from my new friends, I learned to distinguish between the various French Basque sheep's-milk varieties, and what made those hard-to-get unpasteurized cheeses worth all the fuss. I became proficient (and downright cocky) at determining a Stilton's ripeness by assessing its color and texture. Soon I could rattle off the perfect assortment of dessert cheeses with my eyes closed.

As my cheese education progressed, I became intrigued by the seeming appropriateness of the cheeses each customer selected. As dogs often resemble their owners, cheese choosers reveal themselves in their selections. Before long, I was in one to two tries able to deduce the cheese a customer would die over (not including persons who are intimidated into buying the first thing you sample them).

Of course many shoppers, I found, had neither the need nor the desire for advice. Demi-cheese mondaines, in their polite disregard for your dairy drivel, can reduce you to Thumbelina size. Take Lauren Hutton, for instance, whom I watched skillfully determine the ripeness of Parmigiano Reggiano by scrutinizing the crunchy age crystals; or Laurie Anderson, who rattled off an impressive order of the triple-creme Explorateur, Manchego, a tarragon- and thyme-crusted goat's-milk cheese called Tomme Fleur Verte, and the scarce Colston Basset Stilton ... and who sweetly but swiftly rejected my suggestion for a fifth selection. And then there are the incognito A- and B-models who, despite never having consumed dairy products, attempt to forge some semblance of domesticity in their otherwise hectic club-going lives. They saunter through the aisles like giraffes, filling dwarfed shopping carts with bouquets of roughage and perhaps a chunk of Leerdammer Lite for company. And finally, of course, you have your Cruella de Ville types with mink-lined hats and blood red lipstick who arrive in full Technicolor splendor at 10 a.m. for their well-rehearsed cheese-platter requests: Reblochon, Blue d'Auvergne, Old Amsterdam aged gouda, Le Chevrot.

Cheese Wiz

Intoxicated by the magic of it all, I threw myself into the job. I erected beautifully stacked, multi-level cheese displays coupled with hand-scripted name cards that gave the counter a fresh-off-the-continent feel. I grew to relish even the most menial tasks in cheese maintenance, like the ceremonious ablution of a molding rind, which involves a delicate sponge bath in white vinegar. And not only would I turn my nose up at those who would deign scrunch their snouts in response to our counter's undeniable aroma, I would all but hiss at those who dared balk at our prices. I convinced myself that Manchego, a simple sheep's-milk cheese from La Mancha, was definitely worth the Dean & Deluca asking price of $19-a-pound.

What's remarkable is how many of my customers seemed to agree. If you're wondering how it is possible for a sane person to spend $5 on a shaving of very common cheese for your very common sandwich (or better yet $3 on a single green apple), consider that that's about how much the average souvenir will cost you these days. The D & D baguette you purchase is in essence a souvenir, symbolic of the whole Dean & Deluca experience, the sum of all the exquisite visual edible parts and the seamless Bob Fosse-like choreography of 150 toiling serfs. The same principle applies to the concession/gift stand purchase at any theater, sports arena, museum. Like any optimal immersive travel experience -- say, eating that hot dog while peering over the side of the Eiffle Tower -- one is simply willing to forgo their frugality of good sense. Which explains why literal souvenir hunters -- German tourists who come in by the bus load in their Birkenstocks-with-socks and commando-style trekking gear; or perhaps Japanese women sporting Chanel bags and Hermes scarves -- are unfazed, having consulted their guide books, by the store's exorbitant costs. Tourists generally don't bat an eye when asked to pay $10 for a small slice of cheese from their homeland, just as they would buy one of those ridiculous Statuettes of Liberty that are manufactured in Taiwan.

But what about the customers who should know better? The ones who live in New York? Here Dean & Deluca's appeal gets more complicated. Granted, the store's goods are of highest quality; it is a grueling selection process to make it to the floor, especially in produce. Organic cherry tomato sirens and supine Japanese eggplant line up like little Miss Universe beauties. Hediard lavender honey from France vies for trendy Belgian Chimay beer's primo slot. But by and large, while the quality of many of the products may be exceptional, the things that people generally buy at Dean & Deluca are on the whole unexceptional -- tomatoes, basil, mozzarella, parmesan cheese, Coach Farms goat cheese -- the kind of stuff found at just about any corner market.

More than a purveyor of fine produce, Dean & Deluca offers its regulars an element of fantasy,, an escape from the mish-mash ugliness of every corner's Korean deli or the fluorescent uniformity of all supermarket chains. The genius of the Dean & Deluca is that it strikes a balance of the bountiful and the minimal -- wealth that doesn't look like gluttony (because gluttony is reserved for the nouveau riche). It is reminiscent of the French or Italian central market but done in pure Soho style -- epic loft ceilings and all the right stainless steel touches. The store achieves a paradoxical industrial rusticity, at once both inviting like a country-kitchen table and Euro-aloof like the double-cheek kiss of a Soho gallery keeper.

At its most profound level, Dean & Deluca is a warehouse full -- not just of cheese, bread, and meats -- but of manufactured, edible class, ripe for big American-style consumption. And what really keeps us coming back for more is a collective admission that America has no taste. How else would the store have the gall to charge $10.95/lb for Grafton Cheddar from Vermont? Or $10.95 for smoked gouda, which is essentially a processed cheese? Not to put too fine a point on it, we are chumps. The success of Dean & Deluca hinges on the assumption that Americans have indiscriminate and impressionable palates and that culinary sophistication and classic taste can be bought. Anyone who knows my thing about food doesn't regularly shop at Dean & Deluca. They might go there to browse or as a last attempt to find, say, a delicious goat's milk cheese called Crottin de Chavignol, resigning themselves to the fact that they will pay three times its retail cost anywhere else. It is the rest of us, insecure in our food savvy, who seek out the tasteful security Dean & Deluca offers. In paying twice its cost elsewhere, we collectively confirm that Dean & Deluca's Grafton Cheddar must somehow be superior to the one at the A & P.

The Cheese Goes Sour

So how did such a promising $7-an-hour career at Dean & Deluca end? Inevitably, after a bit of time on the other side of the counter, I no longer felt transported to that wonderful world of the Tuscan kitchen. After all, my job as one of the performers was to endure the less-than-glamorous realities in order to help manufacture its myth. The unwritten part of the chorus girl job description goes as follows: look the other way while management threatens to fire a 7-months-pregnant employee for not tucking in her untuckable shirt (you can now find her at Gounuet Garage); feign indifference when you get frisked on your way out the door for leftover baguettes that go in the dump moments after workers swipe out; embrace a brand of corporate downsizing that lays off pittance-an-hour workers while taking on more high-end "consultants," each of whom has his own definite and invaluable opinion about where the new cracker displays should be set up. On my final, fateful evening there, two henchmen with Welcome-back-kotter-hair escorted me into the principal's office, 10 minutes to closing. Surrounded by a pack of mid- to high-level management, I was fired because of a "bad attitude" that was "beginning to rub off on the others." Boo hoo. All I could think about were those pieces of unwrapped Gorgonzola Dolce and Shropshire Blue, a blue-veined and potentially oozy English Cheddar on the back counter, and how I wouldn't be cleaning up that night. I had heard that when you get fired, you have to leave on the spot, lest you go postal. I just felt badly for the pastry floater who would have to close on his own.

I took my time leaving, saying good-bye to the lovely ladies in bread, high-living the affable charcuterie department, tiptoeing around the skittish pasta marm who is notorious for hurling clipboards at just about anyone who crosses her. On my way out the front, I bid my adieus to the gals in pastry, one of whom whispered in my ear that she had just put in a bid to a guy "who could have that pig's legs broken" It was all too ridiculous. And appropriate.

As I walked along Prince Street, the next thing I knew I was at a wonderfully disorganized Korean market, an uncontrollable cheshire grin on my face, ordering a plain old cheese sandwich: white bread and an anonymous American cheddar. The Saran wrap was a little puckered and the bread came out of a plastic bag, but it cost 93 cents and it couldn't have been better.