Cowgirl Creamery, RIP

It was one of the best things in DC but it was hard to get to. The owners of a really great cheese shop admitted that it was location that did them in as they shut the DC store at the end of the year. They seemed surprised that a location near the Spy Museum but far from the office buildings at 12th and 13th did not generate a lot of foot traffic of people doing their grocery shopping.

I'd like to think that was the only reason, and that if, for instance, they had located the shop somewhere in Chevy Chase, they might have had more luck. But I suspect not because I think there's more to it than that.

Washington is just not well suited to specialty food stores. To support these gems, you need living neighborhoods, where people shop and go out in the evening. Perhaps Capitol Hill or 14th Street are getting there, but even prosperous places like Chevy Chase and Georgetown don't seem that welcoming. After all, Marvelous Market failed at its original location at Connecticut and Nebraska and I don't think Stachowski's, for all the quality of its products, is long for this earth.

Which brings up a second point. There is no culture of service or knowledge in the operation of these stores. When we stopped in Stachowski's the other night we were waited on by two young men, one more clueless than the other, with little knowledge of the products or how to handle them. Our shoppers are content to do one-stop shopping at Whole Foods and our society generates young people capable of working as a cog in a supermarket system but with no love or feeling for food.

But there's more. The new Bethesda bakery, Fresh Baguette, has little chance of survival, I think, even though the bakers are genuine French and produce excellent bread and pastries. But they are making little effort to adapt to American tastes, offering up these pathetic sandwich fillings to a sprinkling of customers while Taylor's is mobbed. The butcher stores that have opened here are equally boutique-y, too precious, not something for daily shopping.

Cowgirl Creamery seemed to have well-trained staff who were knowledgeable and passionate about the product, but I rarely saw any of them a second time (though admittedly I went very infrequently). Were they not paid enough? Were the working conditions harsher than they seemed? Again, I suspect that American youth who would be good at the job can't work for what they're paid, and those that will work for that amount don't have the training or the interest in the product.

The long and short of it is that specialty food stores need an urban, foot-traffic culture to thrive and Washington, like most of America, is a suburban, car-driven culture. In that context, and given the stratification in society with no effort to train youth in artisanal food, it will be franchised, process-oriented food places that thrive.