Erewhon Is Not A Grocery Store

Everyone is trying to get to the bar. The name of the bar? The bar is called Erewhon. This past January, I spent a long weekend in Los Angeles. I was excited to catch up with my friends and their dogs, to swap Mediterranean oak forest for chaparral and the faintly hallucinatory deep-winter warmth endemic to that biome, and to microdose the L.A. experience of encountering celebrities in mundane contexts. But mostly I wanted to go to Erewhon. Erewhon is a chain of grocery stores with locations throughout the greater L.A. area. The chain gets its name (an anagram of "nowhere") from a satirical 1872 Samuel Butler novel about a "utopian" society that locks up the ill, forcing people to tend to their health and wellness under threat of imprisonment. Erewhon is known primarily for selling smoothies and a suite of ridiculous wellness products, all for outrageous amounts of money, though the items on offer at the store only go so far in explaining the broader Erewhon phenomenon and the chain's nimbus of mystical prestige. Most grocery stores, particularly in L.A., sell overpriced smoothies and serums, but only Erewhon attracts the paparazzi, carries itself like a luxury brand, and symbolizes something deeper about health and consumerism. So what distinguishes Erewhon?