Cara Delevingne, Ashley Benson, and a rubber-gloved Kaia Gerber were spotted on a friend date there in March. In April, Jake Gyllenhaal and Demi Lovato each popped in wearing masks, followed by Hilary Duff in May and Miley Cyrus in June. After reportedly splitting from Delevingne, Benson returned in July with rapper G-Eazy. In August, A$AP Rocky scanned the snackage.

*Stefon voice:* The hottest pandemic club in Los Angeles is Erewhon, the all-organic, frequently macrobiotic VIP room of grocery stores where vegan coconut yogurt costs $19, and there's a naturopathic doctor on staff to recommend calming “reishi” mushrooms. According to Erewhon Twitter, Steven Tyler once whispered “You're beautiful” to a female shopper, and Ellen may or may not have reamed out the hot-bar staff for running out of scrambled eggs.

Under a statewide stay-at-home order that shuttered Hollywood, amid an attention apocalypse in which there was nowhere to go and, worse, nowhere to be seen, stars still flocked to Erewhon (pronounced “air-eh-won” but, in certain surfer-dude lilts, is reduced to two syllables: “air-won”).

The prepared buffalo cauliflower is a near-erotic experience for many, but “the real draw of Erewhon is that it's a scene,” chef and Fresh Off the Boat author Eddie Huang emailed from Taipei. “You bump into everyone you matched on Raya or once met at Benny Blanco's house.”

Unsure of where they'd snap celebrities in a dystopian Hollywood, paparazzi set up among the shopping carts in parking lots across Erewhon's six-store mini-empire (including Fairfax, Venice, and the Kardashian-settled Calabasas). “You used to get celebrities there on occasion pre-pandemic,” said Grant Hodgson, news editor at photo agency Backgrid. Leonardo DiCaprio and Dakota Johnson are regulars; Kanye West famously tweeted about the “Erewhon drip” (a trying/not-trying outfit of fleece, sweats, and one athletic sandal). “But post-pandemic, it's become an absolute staple. It's more popular than ever.”

For shoppers of the Who? Weekly set—your Brody Jenners and Tommy Dorfmans—an Erewhon jaunt under quarantine offers both CBD lemonade and a stab at relevance. “It says, ‘I'm going to the grocery store,’ ” says Chris Black, cofounder of brand consultancy Public Announcement and a self-aware Erewhon shopper, “even though it's a grocery store where everything is very expensive, and it's completely out of reach of most Americans.” Full carts are a status symbol that Black estimates can cost $1,000 (if you're not buying vitamins), another pandemic inequity, considering L.A. County is the most food insecure in the nation.

When COVID-19 hit, Erewhon doubled down on its trademark California chill, creating a “safe haven” for privileged clientele. “We have such a warrior spirit,” said Jason Widener, Erewhon vice president of store development and a former actor who played a young Josiah Bartlet on The West Wing.

The Goop-endorsed tonic bar crafted a blood-red, immunity-boosting “lung fortifying tonic” full of “amazing adaptogenic” ingredients such as “chaga, astragalus, cordyceps, and platycodon.” Erewhon opened early for the elderly and gave them free chlorophyll water. A few Nextdoor complaints reported Erewhon shoppers failed to social-distance, but those who balked at the store's mask order weren't turned away. “If you can't put your mask on, listen: Give me your credit card, give me a list,” Widener said he told people at the door. “I will go shop for you personally right now.”

Director Sebastian Siegel, an Erewhon devotee, declined to stock up on groceries. He only wanted to spend more time at Erewhon during the pandemic. “I'm very comfortable with whatever the world has to serve up,” Siegel says. (As long as it's not buffalo cauliflower, which he doesn't eat because: starch.)

Erewhon considers itself much more than a grocer—it's a community of like-minded people, bonded by a love of locally plucked figs. Its name is an anagram of “nowhere,” an homage to Samuel Butler's 1872 novel about what appears to be a utopian society. (Others have noted that Erewhon is also the name of the prison in the 1997 cult classic Face/Off.) “You don't even have to talk to each other,” said Lesia Dallimore, Erewhon's vice president of brand. “The eye contact that you make waiting for your tonic-bar beverage is this comforting moment, like, ‘We'll get through this together.’ ”

When the original Erewhon opened its doors in Boston in 1966, there weren't enough grains to stock the shelves, just a modest supply of whole wheat in an old-fashioned general store. Natural foods bubbled up as options in the 1940s in response to DDT and chemical farming, but health nuttery remained on the fringe while TV dinners took off. Erewhon's married cofounders were the late Michio and Aveline Kushi. Michio, who came to America from Japan in 1949 as a political science student, adopted the ethos that natural foods could be a gateway to world peace. “Healthy people create healthy, peaceful families, communities, society, and eventually the world,” is how macrobiotic counselor Denny Waxman, who trained with the Kushis at the original Erewhon, describes the philosophy. “It was a biological revolution.” Erewhon became a hangout, with people piling into vans and driving hundreds of miles to visit.

According to Waxman, Aveline was the “dynamo” behind Erewhon's expansion to Los Angeles in 1969—11 years before Whole Foods' founding. “Whole Foods did a great job, up until about 10 years ago,” Widener said, when it changed its produce from organic to an organic-plus-conventional mix, then got Amazoned. Meanwhile, Kraft had given way to Annie's and organic food became the $50 billion business Erewhon had planted the seeds for. Two decades ago, Erewhon was still a single “funky, old-school health food store,” where Moon Juice founder Amanda Chantal Bacon met store legend Truth Calkins manning an outpost of L.A. herbal bar Dragon Herbs inside Erewhon. Calkins “was my favorite bartender,” Chantal Bacon says, delivering custom elixirs for immunity, exhaustion, or her cycle. “I don't drink, so this really was like my version of going to a bar.” Widener quips, “I always say, get high off the good stuff.”

So began Erewhon's metamorphosis from groovy grocer to social club. Widener remembers James Gandolfini circling the tonic bar before his death in 2013. “I was like, ‘Dude, stop staring at the menu, come here and let me help you,’ ” he says. Jennifer Garner's Once Upon a Farm baby food landed on shelves in 2016 and a pregnant Kim Kardashian came in. Widener grew “very close” with other celebrities he wishes he could name. “I can call Owen Wilson anytime I want. People like that.”

The rise of Instagram coupled with the nebulous notion of “wellness” helped make Erewhon the new Ivy—a Stories-worthy scene where influencers in mauve leggings pop their heels before the rainbow wall of juices. “It attracts guys who drive G-Wagons and girls who are sporty and rich and like Yeezys,” Black says. “Those people, 5 to 10 years ago, would have been in a club, doing coke, partying, drinking. Now, being healthy is cool. Having a $30 lunch at a grocery store is cool.”

Under new owner Tony Antoci, Erewhon has gone wide, expanding from one store to six, following the luxury high-rises into newly gentrified neighborhoods. On season two of You, Penn Badgley's pathological Joe works at Anavrin (an anagram of “nirvana”), an obvious Erewhon stand-in.

The chain inspires love and mockery in equal measure: “Erewhon serves a function for really rich, lazy people who want to shop for produce and perhaps cross paths with someone they forgot to have sex with,” Huang says. Widener claims to love my question about Erewhon's high prices, maintaining that practically every product in the store has a detailed, Portlandia sketch-worthy backstory. The Pachamama Farm sausage from Oregon is “the best sausage in the world,” he said. “They're wild-foresting animals.” But Erewhon downplays that it's a capitalist enterprise. “Profit is the side effect of our real purpose,” Antoci declares on the website.

Erewhon could soon bring its characteristically California business back to the East Coast. Ever since New York private equity firm Stripes assumed an ownership stake in 2019, a New York outpost has been buzzed about. “Erewhon can become a national brand,” Stripes founder Ken Fox told Forbes last year. Can it? Luxe grocers like Citarella and Dean & DeLuca (RIP) have long been the provenance of Upper East Side doyennes, while the influencer set flits to Cha Cha Matcha. “People are wearing full-on outfits when it's a hundred degrees to go get some kale,” Black laughed of the paparazzi-documented Erewhon outing. “It's a scene that can only exist in L.A.”

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