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Of Cabbages and Kings

Inside the secret world of Dallas’s poshest grocery store
By Skip Hollandsworth |

IT IS FRIDAY AFTERNOON, THE CROWDS ARE STARTING TO COME THROUGH THE DOORS like people rushing for a bomb shelter, and a fruitcake crisis is developing. The specialized Simon David fruitcake labels aren’t finished yet. and the Christmas season is coming up fast, and the man who has the fruitcakes sitting in a warehouse is wondering what to do, and somebody had better get moving. Leaping from his desk as if his chair has exploded underneath him, Simon David store director Ted Fullerton heads out of his office. What is going on here? Just what would the customers think if they don’t have fruitcakes with Simon David labels on them?

From his office on the mezzanine level, Fullerton barrels through the door and nearly slams into the store’s consumer affairs and media relations director, Carole Farr, who has a crisis of her own. She’s supposed to find a polo team for the store to sponsor. The obvious question-why does a grocery store need to sponsor a polo team?-is never asked. What, for that matter, is a grocery store doing with a media relations director? Fullerton speaks with Carole, learning along the way that a journalist is flying in from Japan next week to interview him about the store, Another obvious question-why would anyone in Japan give a damn about a grocery store in Dallas?-is not even brought up, Instead, Fullerton asks, “Does he speak English?” Fullerton, forty-five, learned his groceries in Lubbock, where he was used to telling people that Del Monte green beans were on Aisle 8. When he started in the business, he was taught that a grocer had a very simple job: he puts out food, and when people pick it up and stick it in their carts, he puts out more food. Now here he is getting interviewed by Japanese journalists, and he’s acting like it’s the most natural thing on earth.

Quickly, Ted Fullerton walks past the store’s resident artist, who is hard at work on a sign that reads “Every Day Low Price.” Then he nods to an employee who is creating extravagant $100 Halloween masks to sell to adults. He brushes past the chocolate counter, which today is featuring Joseph Schmidt truffles lor $22 a pound, makes a left turn at the gift area displaying $8 notepads and $17 picture frames, looks momentarily at the perfume case with its $75 bottles of Yves Saint Laurent Opium, then cuts through Simon David’s Cafe, where the special of the day is zucchini-stuffed pork chops with mustard sauce for $5.95.

Time is passing. Fullerton glances at his watch. God Almighty. He’s got to get home soon to pack for his trip the next day to New York, where he will be conducting research into the grocery stores and gourmet foods of Manhattan with five of his assistants. Also, the Dallas Symphony people want to talk with him before he leaves about the store sponsoring one of their events. For Fullerton, this is Just another normal day. With a weary sigh, looking as if the weight of the world is upon his back, Fullerton pauses at the top of the steps leading down onto the main floor, the two gold rings on his fingers shining underneath the lights.

And then, for just a moment, he smiles. Fullerton is looking down on the huge layout of Simon David, all 33,000 square feet of it, described by an awestruck Chicago Tribune writer as “a theatre set.” It is elegant and seductive, the brass fixtures gleaming, the floors polished, the shelves filled with fantastic riches thai make the mind delight in the excess that is Dallas. For here, indeed, is the steadfast sanctuary of the wealthy and those who wish to be, a Dallas fixture almost since the city began, an emblem of what so many people are striving to become. It is a social island to itself, one that has ingrained itself into the daily habits of thousands of Dallas residents. It is our great attempt to render the highest kind of beauty to the world of food. It is-and one must keep reminding oneself of this over and over-a grocery store.

Simon David, on Inwood at University just west of die Park Cities, is one of die most famous and profitable grocery stores in the country, a marketing marvel, a gourmet supermarket that can set out astonishingly expensive items beside regular-priced items, and then persuade people to buy them all. In American society, where the grocery store has always been our most common common denominator, utterly unremarkable, with the same look and same smell, with grocery carts that always have one screwed-up wheel that goes in a different direction than the other three, it is amazing that the Simon David grocery has become more of a phenomenon than a place to buy food.

Simon David regulars would sooner walk into a den of wild beasts and bite a Hon on the neck than go to another store. And Simon David reflects one of the basic rules of high society: once you are in. it’s hard to imagine yourself getting out. People linger in the store for hours. They meet there for lunch. They bring their out-of-town relatives in to see it. They look at the $329.99 can of fresh Beluga caviar. They bend down with their hands on their knees to view the ten kinds of salmon and eleven varieties of lamb in the meat department. At me wine racks, they pass up well-known bottles of wine from respected vineyards to buy wine that carries the private Simon David label. They purchase some kind of bizarre, dried matsutake mushroom, or dried papaya spears-stuff they have never even tasted-simply because it is sold at the store. Simon David is expected to do $28 million in sales this year; industry experts say that makes it the biggest money-maker of any grocery store in Dallas.

’Tin telling you,” says Bishop J. Allen, the man who is responsible for the creation of the modern-day Simon David, “there are people who try to think of reasons to come here, even when they don’t need to get anything- It is hard to imagine what’s happened, and I’m not altogether sure how it’s happened, but this has become a place to see and be seen.”

Now there are plans to export the Simon David mystique around the country. The Cullum Companies Inc., which also owns the Tom Thumb grocery stores, will open a Simon David in Austin early next year, then another Simon David in North Dallas. On the drawing board are Simon Davids in Fort Worth, Houston, and California. The Si-monizing of the world has begun.

How does a grocery store become a status symbol? And how has it changed not only the way some people are eating, but the way they are living? The answer has something to do with luck, something to do with genius, and a lot to do with completely befuddling twists of logic.

Ted Fullerton, making his way now down die eighteen steps from the mezzanine to the first floor, is looking left, then right. Fruitcakes are on his mind, but it is his nature to check on everything around him. He notices Bernie Kottwitz, the tall, looming frozen foods manager who is discussing frozen dinners with Shirley Parish, an architect’s wife and mother of four who once brought her vacation Bible School class into Simon David so they could look at all the lobsters wriggling around in the lobster lank over in the meat section. It was because of frozen foods, so the story goes, that the wife of a prominent Dallas plastic surgeon realized her husband, with whom she recently had separated, was seeing another woman. They passed one another in a Simon David aisle and looked into each other’s baskets, as people tend to do at grocery stores. The wife gasped. There were only a couple of frozen dinners in his basket. Someone else, the wife decided, must be doing the cooking.

Fullerton, aiming for the front of the store, hustles past a simple display of wines that, frankly, would look rather pedestrian compared to the old Rolls-Royce the staff once brought in and covered with bottles of fine wine. As quick as a bantamweight, he sidesteps the cart of the wealthy widow, Mrs. Julia Sonnentheil, ninety-one years old, who shops three times a week with her maid, Ann. The two, who have been together for twenty-four years, move very slowly up and down the aisles, often holding up traffic I while they argue about which item to get. The maid rolls her eyes and Mrs. Sonnentheil, leaning on the cart like it’s a cane, refuses to change her mind. “I’d shop alone,” Mrs. Sonnentheil says stubbornly, “but I can’t drive here myself.” Fullerton smiles, pleasantly-the customer always comes first, the Simon David people say-and then he I moves on past the hundred brands of beer, past the wine cases featuring such grocery’ store staples as $250 bottles of ChateauMargeaux, and then pas! the forty-eight-fool-long cheese shop, which serves 125 varieties of cheese and includes enormous sausages and Danish hams and even eggs that have the ’’Simon David” logo delicately stamped on the shells. The actress Linda Gray can sometimes be found standing here when the cast of “Dallas” is in town shooting. The actress Dorothy Malone is a regular. As is the mayor, Annette Strauss. As well as Mrs. Margot Perot. Before he was reelected governor, Bill Clements used to be a frequent visitor. In one of the city’s most sordid trials of this past year, former city parks director Jack Robinson claimed he was not at a city park one Sunday morning exposing himself to another man, but was happily shopping at the Simon David. Long ago, at the old Simon David store, Edward, the Duke of Windsor who gave up the throne for Mrs. Simpson, marched in and ordered meat, He was refueling in Dallas on his way somewhere and told his pilot to stop because he wanted to go to the Simon David. “See, you can put your hands on the same things the rich and famous do.” says Ted Fullerton, expressing the philosophy of an age that now considers the very basic human process of food gathering as a celebrity event.

Fullerton is now at the front, watching the human sea sweep in and out of the store. Every customer looks like someone who’s heading for, or just leaving, a party. Classical music plays softly from the store’s loudspeakers. Here is a woman with grapefruit colored-hair, holding a shopping list as long as the Dallas social register. Here is a woman talking to a friend, dropping more names than an autumn tree drops leaves. Here is Hawkins, the chauffeur, who comes to the store each afternoon in his dark blue suit to buy groceries for his employer, who lives on Beverly Drive. Here is Shelley Hudgins, a real estate developer’s wife, with her two small children, making one of her thrice-weekly trips to the store. She once brought to the store a carload of relatives who were visiting from the little West Texas town of Wheeler, all because she wanted them to see a grocery store with an elevator. “The only elevator in Wheeler,” she says, “is at the courthouse, and it doesn’t run real well.1’ Here is Debbie Snell, a lawyers wife: she once had a cake made for the Simon David butchers to show her appreciation for their work.

Fullerton looks upon everyone with a benign smile, a look that seems to combine the greatest of good will to his fellow human beings with the smug assurance that these very human beings will buy most of the stuff that is sitting on the shelves, even if it does have an awful name like “white birginette eggplant.” According to a store survey, the median age of Simon David shoppers is thirty-one and the median family income is $44,000.

If they grab one of the SI00 grocery carts and turn right, they pass the magazine rack-filled with publications like Millionaire and Town and Country, but not any confession or motorcycle magazines-and then suddenly find themselves in the crown jewel of the store, its most baffling section: the produce department.

In 1985, when Bishop Allen, the Cullum Co. vice president and general manager in charge of Simon David, decided to expand the store and make it world-class, the first thing he did was build up the produce. He demanded that each vegetable or fruit be stacked several feet high, to make the place look like an upscale farmer’s market. He said that as soon as one apple was taken off the top of the pile, another apple must be put back on. If a banana wasn’t perfectly ripe, then it would not be put on display. If an orange had a blemish, throw it away. “It is an incredibly beautiful area, the store’s centerpiece,” says Leni Reed, a well-known supermarket consultant and diet writer whose nationally distributed home video about tips on supermarket shopping, called “Supermarket Savvy,” was filmed this year at the Simon David store. “I’m the sort of person who goes to supermarkets the way other people go to museums. And when I go to Simon David, it’s like walking into the Metropolitan Museum of Art.”

But Bishop Allen was not satisfied with beauty alone. Operating under the adage, “Price is absolutely secondary to us1-a blasphemous phrase in the grocery business, which survives on very small profit margins-he had his produce staff come up with foods that were flat-out bizarre and outrageously expensive. Instead of bell peppers from McAllen, Texas, which you can buy for twenty-five cents each, the bell peppers at Simon David come from Holland and are $5.99 a pound. Papayas in South Texas are thirty-five cents apiece. Here they cost $1.89 each. Two little figs cost $2.16. One passion fruit, which is about the size of a golf ball, costs $1.99: if you’re lucky, you can get three spoonfuls of fruit from that.

Here are fresh nasturtium flowers for $1.99 a pound. Apparently, you are supposed to eat them. There’s rhubarb for $1.99 a pound, to make something called rhubarb pie. Over on another shelf are dried white jelly fungi mushrooms, which look exactly like the kind of mushrooms you would not even step on as a kid because you thought you’d be poisoned. The odds are good that most customers who come through the produce department don’t know what to do with any of these things, but they stick them in their baskets anyway. For many Simon David shoppers, asking questions about certain trendy foods is about as gauche as a man at a symphony concert unbuttoning his shirt and asking the lady beside him if she’d like to see the tattoo on his chest.

Still standing in the front of the store, Ted Fullerton has, for the moment, stopped thinking about fruitcakes. Watching Eugene Barnes, the hearing-impaired teenager who is the store’s best sacker (he won the store’s recent “sack-off” competition, packing two full bags of groceries in fifty-two seconds), Fullerton is reminded of another problem, and this one is big. It has been the controversial issue of supermarkets in the Eighties, and it is the kind of thing that can send a shiver of fear down the spine of a professional grocer. The subject: paper or plastic. Should Simon David move to plastic bags like most other grocery stores? The debate has been raging for months. Diane Perez, who is the department head in charge of the cashiers and sack boys, hates plastic. She likes to hear that snap as the paper bag is unfolded. She likes the way food items fit into the paper bag. On the other hand, a lot of customers have been requesting plastic. Plastic bags are easier to carry, especially for the older customers. Fullerton has ordered plastic bags, but the question is: will people really use them?

Deep in thought, he heads down Aisle 10, past a staggering array of forty-one different selections of vinegar, twenty-two different kinds of olive oils, fifteen ounces of plum pudding for a whopping $4.39, bottles of sauerkraut juice, five brands of chutney, and forty-five kinds of mustard. After the obvious question-why would one possibly need so much mustard, when most groceries have just three or four?-Fullerton suddenly says, “That reminds me. I’ve got to try out more mustard.” Waiting up in his office is an entire box of fancy new mustards that must meet his approval. There are such brands as “Prince William’s Mustard with Scotch Whiskey” and “Prince William’s Scotch Hot Mustard.” There is also “Across the Border Boogie Woogie Bar-B-Que Sauce” and “Across the Border Hellish Relish with Jalapeno.” If Fullerton likes them, he’ll put a few bottles on the same shelves with the other mustards and see if they’ll sell. But doesn’t it seem absurd that the world needs more mustard?

“Oh, no,” says Fullerton with utter confidence, “that’s what gourmet is all about.”

And with that, he is headed back to his office, to get ready for New York, where he will be vigilant for yet another mustard that might strike the gourmet tastes of upscale Dallas. The fruitcake crisis is still unresolved, as is paper versus plastic, and by the time he reaches his office, an assistant manager is telling him about another crisis with the specialized Simon David turkey labels. Ted Fullerton sighs. “No telling what you have to face,” he says, “to stay on the cutting edge in this business.”

IT IS HARD TO PINPOINT THE PRECISE DATE of the gourmet foods revolution in Dallas. But in 1889, a man named Simon David, fleeing from the Prussian Army, left Germany and made his way to Dallas. He was a Jewish immigrant, a peddler, wearing a knapsack on his back and going from home to home, selling goods. Oddly, a Dallas bank president took a liking to the old man and gave him the money to build a little wooden shack on Colby Street. David opened a feed and grain store, hung some smoked meats up from the ceiling, bought some mules, and sent his children and grandchildren on the mules around to the rich people’s homes. The kids would take orders, ride back to the store to fill them, and then head back to the houses to make deliveries.

“Well, the old man began putting up all this caviar in his store and those foreign jellies,” says Simon David’s grandson, Melvin Samuels, who is now eighty years old and still living in Dallas. “I figured these old Texas people wouldn’t buy any of this stuff. Good God in heaven, was I wrong. They all wanted to show off. So they stuck caviar on their table, even though they probably didn’t like it.”

By 1926, the Simon David store, run by David’s son Delmar, had moved to a bigger location out on Oak Lawn, closer to where the wealthy of the city were moving. Quickly, Delmar David established himself as the grocer for high society. They added produce and other gourmet items like snails. “Snails really didn’t sell like we thought they would,” recalls Samuels. “Some people tried them, but then I think they took them out in their back yard and buried them.” Oil heiress Mrs. CF. Carter, one of the first residents of Beverly Drive, would pull up in her chauffeur-driven limousine, give her order to Delmar, then wait patiently in the back seat while the stock boys got the groceries. Soon, Toddie Lee Wynne Sr. was doing the same thing in his limousine, and the rest of upper-end Dallas followed.

The store passed down through the family and moved out to Inwood Road in I960, where all the food was squeezed into a little 8,000-square-foot building. As the big chains like Kroger and Safeway entered Dallas, business at the odd little store with foreign foods began to fall off. By 1963, the family decided to sell to one of Dallas’s most famous grocery families, the Cullums.

The Cullum family, a bunch of straight-talking, old-school grocers, wasn’t completely sure what to do with a gourmet food store. It wasn’t making much money, and the gourmet foods industry really hadn’t caught on with the public. As a result, for twenty years, the company considered the Simon David store as a harmless, eccentric uncle and left it alone. A man named Bubba Smith (really) was the gourmet foods buyer, and his results were dubious at best. “He bought hundreds of pounds of some foreign coffee that we couldn’t give away,” remembers one of the former store directors, Ralph Kaufmann. “He bought things that looked plain ugly, Of course, he didn’t care. He was real religious. All he wanted to do was preach to the stockboys about Jesus.”

Says Bishop Allen, “I remember first walking into that store back in the Sixties, and I stared at all those chocolate-cove red ants and those strange meats and those bottles of oil, and I said, “Ick.’ “

But, ironically, it was Allen himself who first began to push the idea that Simon David might revolutionize the Dallas grocery scene. When he became a division manager for Cullum’s Tom Thumb stores in 1979, he encouraged expansion of Simon David. The grocery store was in a perfect location. Allen wanted to add a touch of, well, snobbishness. He said: let’s turn a trip to the grocery into a spectacle. Give customers a classy restaurant, the best deli and bakery, wine tastings, and all the ingredients on the grocery shelves to make a five-star dinner. Instead of putting a bunch of toilet paper in the display units at the end of the aisle, let’s show some expensive teas or even caviar. Let’s import some Japanese pears that cost $4.50 each, even if we don’t make a profit: people will begin to believe they can get anything here.

There was a small problem. Bishop Allen didn’t know any more about gourmet food than he did nuclear weapons. He didn’t cook, and he certainly didn’t spend his time in chic restaurants speaking French to the chefs. Bishop Allen played golf. “I started going to these specialty food shows in New York,” Allen, who’s forty, recalls, “and I was overwhelmed. I’d see fifty kinds of chocolates and five hundred kinds of vinegars, and I’d say, ’Now which one should I buy?’”

Needless to say, the company’s board of directors was not exactly enthusiastic over the new plan-especially when it heard that the plan included buying more land, tearing down the old store, and replacing it with the most expensive store in the company’s history. Total cost: $4.9 million, including bakery cases from West Germany that would cost $1,500 a foot, and a $575,000 mezzanine. “We were scared to death,” says Tom Hairston, Cullum’s chief operating officer, “that no one would walk up those stairs to the mezzanine.” The plans also called for some 300 employees for the 33,000-square-foot store; a usual Tom Thumb has 175 employees for 55,000 square feet.

In 1983, after a few years of indecision, the board gave the go-ahead for the new store. Allen began flying all over the country studying upscale supermarkets. He would also eat in the finest restaurants. If something struck his fancy-presto!-he would get it for Simon David. From Maxwell’s Plum restaurant in New York, he found raisin pumpernickel bread. From Sign of the Dove restaurant, also in New York, he found a pepper bread that has become one of the store’s biggest sellers. At New York’s Helms-ley Palace, he tasted one of the world’s most expensive Jamaican coffees and decided to bring it to Dallas, even though it cost a whopping $2.19 for two ounces. Allen was willing to take all kinds of gambles. From a man in a ponytail who pulled up to the store one day in a pickup truck, Allen bought pasta that had purportedly been dried in Arizona mountain air.

The process of picking gourmet foods for Simon David was certainly far from scientific. The company named Dennis Tolleson as the new meat market manager for the store. A thin, bespectacled man, Tolleson spent most of his grocery career in little grocery stores in West Texas towns, He was an expert at cutting meat, but what did he know about smoked kippers or game hens?

“Not a damn thing,” he says. But off he went to develop the most extravagant meat selection in the city. He began buying all kinds of lamb, fish, even veal liver (“I don’t eat liver, and never will, so don’t ask me what it tastes like,” he says firmly). He also bought rat-tlesnake meat (“We keep it in the back. We don’t want anybody who hates snakes to get queasy when they see it”).

Simon David’s grand opening was held in May 1985. More than 3,500 of the city’s rich and influential came to sip champagne, eat chocolate-covered strawberries, listen to a string quintet, and walk around and stare at groceries. Within a month, the success of the store exceeded the company’s wildest expectations. Progressive Grocer magazine called Simon David “the Neiman-Marcus of supermarkets.” Another trade publication, Showcase, called the store “a Texas saga with international implications.”

It wasn’t long before Bishop Allen was considered one of the geniuses of the gourmet foods industry, despite the fact that he once ordered a load of dried, foul-lasting epicurean mushrooms for the store that customers absolutely haled. The mushrooms, still a sore subject with Allen, can be found even now at the end of the frozen foods aisle, sitting alone, untouched. Ted Fullerton-despite his West Texas accent, his meat-and-potatoes grocery background, and his tendency to consider such things as “Johnny Walker Malt Whiskey Cake” a gourmet item-also became known as a specialty foods expert.

Who could have predicted any of this would have happened? As meat connoisseur Tolleson says, “It ain’t just amazing. It’s danged unbelievable.”

IT IS MONDAY AFTERNOON. TED FULLER-ton is back from New York, and the world of Simon David is embossed with its usual, social hue. There are three women gossiping in produce, their grocery carts touching; they are talking so fast to one another that they sound like a basketful of puppies. There is a young married couple, shopping together. She hands him a cantaloupe, lovingly, as if giving him a ring. He holds it solemnly, then hands it back with an affirmative nod. Two of the best-known maids who come to the store are in Aisle 12, by the canned vegetables, both complaining about their rich employers. Mary Lueckemeyer is in to buy her week’s worth of food. The staff normally sees her every day of the week. Tuesdays, she eats lunch in the cafe. Wednesdays, she buys carrots and apples for her horses. Thursdays, she comes for milk and fresh flowers to put around the house. Fridays, she cashes a check. Saturdays, she eats lunch and gets wine. Sundays, she arrives to buy fresh meat for the weekly family cookout. And Mondays, she starts all over, returning to buy the week’s groceries. Fullerton doesn’t seem disappointed over missing the usual weekend madness, the busiest time of the week for the store. But he also missed one of Bishop Allen’s taste testings, Allen assembled five Simon David workers to try the Simon David Cafe’s new cappuccino. One was Dennis Tolleson, who promptly took one sip, nearly spit it out, and jumped up to grab a regular cup of coffee. The others drank and made appropriate murmurs, all waiting to see what Allen would say. He decided that one was too sweet and the other could use a little more liquor-and everyone agreed. Then Allen, his mind always working, leaned back in his chair and said, “What about offering cappuccino to go?” Everyone nodded thoughtfully. Allen has also contemplated installing a sushi bar in Simon David, and a tortilla factory, and an ice cream shop. “Bishop is obsessed with making this place perfect “Tolleson says. “If there’s fly dung on the ceiling, he’ll see it and demand that someone clean it up.”

“There are few places left,” he says, “where you can go in this city and feel like you’re in a nice small town, where everyone knows your name and wants to make you smile.”

Suddenly, media relations director Carole Farr comes up to remind Fullerton about his interview. Oh, yes, he almost forgot. The Japanese journalist is here. Eddy Nakamura, associate editor of a monthly Japanese retailing magazine called Hanbai-Kakushin, has been wandering around the store as well, taking notes, looking very serious.

Quickly, he is ushered into Fullerton’s office. To shake Nakamura’s hand, Fullerton steps over a box of “New Englander Sweet Cranberry Marmalade” and “New Englander Plum Rum Jam,” two more sample products he needs to taste. Fullerton seems distracted- He knows the fruitcake crisis is still unresolved from last week, and he’s got to make a decision about where to display some new Chinese foods, and he’s got to get downstairs to try the $13.95-a-pound shrimp salad in the deli to make sure it tastes right today, and he wants to check on the sales of a new fish, called Tilapia, that the meat market has just introduced, and a new Hawaiian coffee that’s just been put on display.

All these things are on Fullerton’s mind as Nakamura phrases a question. Speaking slowly, his brow furrowed. Nakamura begins. “I am interested in trends,” he says, and pauses to consult his notebook. “Do your customers like to try different foods?”

Outside Fullerton’s office, assistant managers are scurrying back and forth, checking on inventory. The department head of food service is in a discussion with the department head of produce. Far out in the back of the store, huge trucks are pulling up to the warehouse to unload even more supplies. Delivery vans are headed out to deliver groceries to people’s homes. Hot loaves of bread are cooking in the ovens of the bakery, and steaks are being perfectly sliced over in the meat department. Everyone wearing a Simon David badge seems to be in a hurry.

“Do the customers like to try different foods?” Fullerton asks, repeating the question . He thinks for a moment. “Good heavens,” he finally says, “I hope so.”

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