Nestled in between a donut shop and an H&R block in the 10th Ward of New Orleans is Stein’s Market and Deli, owned and operated by its namesake and local legend, Dan Stein. Starting from early in his food-service career, Stein has spent the last 16 years growing to be a flag-bearer for the city’s beer community. Leveraging distribution knowledge he gleaned from his time running a Philadelphia cheese shop and connections made through the deli, he introduced consumers to new and exciting tastes and encouraged distributors to send more beer to the region to meet growing demand. He did it because he wanted to. He did it because no one else had.
In the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, craft beer’s presence in the city was meager. But as New Orleans rebuilt, the tide was also beginning to turn on local and imported craft beers. That vitalization came from an unlikely source in an unlikely place—a former lawyer and cheesemonger and his unassuming deli.
“Back in the day, when Dan was first starting and I was just getting into the business, there was very little craft beer available in the state,” says Polly Watts, former owner of New Orleans’ Avenue Pub, who credits Stein with changing attitudes of the city’s drinkers. “Dan worked with the distributors and importers of high-end craft for a long time to bring unusual things—or anything he could get his hands on that was good.”
“He had lived in other states, so he knew that [craft beer] was big and getting bigger,” Watts continues. “There was no reason it couldn’t be big here as well; we just didn’t have access to it, and there was nobody championing it in the way that Dan did.”
In the past 15 years, Stein’s work and influence have grown to something of a cultlike following that includes, but is not limited to: tattoos in his likeness, requests to officiate weddings, and a successful online effort to get him on an episode of the most recent season of Netflix’s “Queer Eye.”
Stein, however, takes a ho-hum attitude toward this reverence among drinkers and diners in The Big Easy, noting that “some of the accolades and attention I get is silly.” When he talks about it, it sounds like just another job duty as assigned: “I mean, it’s nice. I enjoy it,” he says. “It makes me feel better about myself.”
To know Dan Stein is to love Dan Stein, some say; without him, New Orleans would not have become the hub for craft beer in the Southeast that it is today. He has been described as a workaholic, cranky, and curmudgeonly. But he has also been called loveable and warm, and described as having a big heart. He’s a good boss, a better human, and is never above cranking through a batch of dirty dishes if that’s what needs to get done.
“He had lived in other states, so he knew that [craft beer] was big and getting bigger. There was no reason it couldn’t be big here as well.”
“Dan was the craft beer person in the city or in the state at the time,” Watts says. “He was the only person interested in it, selling it on any kind of depth of scale. Back then, there wasn’t much available, whereas we have so much now. Dan worked really hard at getting things into the state and spreading the word about how wonderful craft beer was.”
Born in 1972 in the suburbs of Philadelphia, Dan Stein finished his degree at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and began his post-college career not knowing what he wanted to do with his life. His father strongly encouraged him to follow in his footsteps and attend law school, so he applied for and was accepted into Temple University’s law school in 1994. He followed that with a clerkship at the staff attorney’s office for the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which covers Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas. It’s the kind of prestigious job dozens of fresh graduates battle through multiple interviews to get. Stein didn’t see it that way.
“It paid alright and it gave me some free time, but did I really like it? No,” he says. “I didn’t really like practicing law.” But it did introduce him to the city of New Orleans, to which he would inevitably return.
After his clerkship in Louisiana, he moved back to Philadelphia and practiced law at a private firm.
“Every Saturday and Sunday, I used to wake up, go to this one breakfast spot, have breakfast by myself, go to the cheese store, get some cheese, head home, then I would drive out to my parent’s house,” he says. “Ultimately, I walked into the cheese store and asked for a job, and I walked into that restaurant and asked for a job, and they both hired me.”
Fueled by a desire to get his hands dirty and not sit in an office wearing a suit and tie every day, he quit his law gig. The restaurant hired him as a dishwasher. The cheese shop made him the manager immediately, even though he had no service industry or food service management experience, because the current manager was on maternity leave. He learned about cheeses, placing orders on a commercial level, and making connections within the community to help the business run as smoothly as possible.
Then, in the summer of 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. It opened his eyes.
“I realized this was where I wanted to be because, going back to Philly after I left the law, I saw how big and impersonal it was. I saw the opportunity to be a big fish in a small pond, especially a pond that had just been annihilated,” he says.
He returned to the city two months after the storm, interviewed for the first job he heard about—stocking shelves at Dorignac’s, a family-owned grocery store just west of the city—and started looking for locations in which to open his own cheese shop. He bounced around a few more cheesemonger and beer-buyer jobs, first at Martin Wine Cellar and then the old Whole Foods on Esplanade, where he learned how to stock beer. Then he began reading about the beers and taking them home to taste them.
“Next thing you know,” he says, “I’m teaching myself about beer.”
He gleaned as much as he could from each post until 2007, when he opened the doors to Stein’s Market and Deli. And while the deli is now a local institution, those first months and years came with a steep learning curve.
“The good thing about post-Katrina, unlike now, it was very forgiving,” he says. “I got lucky. There was a lot of trying to figure it out. I used to do my own dishes and sweep and mop and then get out of here at like three in the morning and turn around and come back for like seven.”
“Hello? Who’s this?”
We’re sitting in the middle of a long section of wooden tables near the front of Stein’s Market and Deli during the final hour of business on a Tuesday afternoon.
“Oh hey, how are you? You’re calling with the credit card? Gotcha. Go ahead.” Stein covers the mouthpiece with his hand and turns to me. “Sorry, got a giant catering order tomorrow—two giant catering orders actually.”
It’s after 4 p.m. but business is still lively, with customers placing orders and choosing their beers, catering clients calling in with orders for the next morning, deliveries of Davidovich bagels and Amoroso’s rolls being hand-carted in and out, the front door creaking open and closed each time.
Returning to the call, he continues, “Like I said, I might need some help getting it upstairs. I got one guy. I’ll send you a text with the total and I’ll give you a call between 8:45 and 9 o’clock, OK?”
Stein gives me as much of his attention as he can, but like many small business owners, he constantly has to split his focus in many directions: Employees need assistance or to confirm their schedule for the following the day, delivery workers look for a signature before they’re on to their next stop, food reps and regulars stop to check in, new faces enter the deli for the first time with awe and hunger. Stein treats his deli like a social hall where everyone is welcome and community is built one customer at a time. He takes his responsibility to ensure the equitability of his attention seriously, even if it comes off as grumbly. Each time he gets pulled away, I look around at the surroundings.
There’s a lot of Batman: figurines, T-shirts,memorabilia. But there’s even more of Stein himself. Posters from old advertising campaigns, collages made by customers, graduation photos taped to the register, even a banner that reads “Smell The Love: Stein’s Market and Deli.” They cover the walls and they all have his face on them.
“This is his house. Like, he has a place that he goes and sleeps, but this is his home. This place is like the inside of his brain,” says Dan Fox, a customer-turned-employee-turned-friend and the publisher of the local alternative newspaper, ANTIGRAVITY Magazine. “It’s a bunch of Batman shit everywhere and I don’t think he likes organization. He spends more time here than at his house, so I would say this is 100% a reflection of him.”
[Disclosure: The author is associate photo editor at ANTIGRAVITY Magazine.]
Boxes upon boxes of Utz and Zapp’s Potato Chips fill the majority of a back wall, and action figures line the shelves. The floor is painted to mimic old decorative tile but is worn down in patches through all the major footpaths of the restaurant. Whatever Coffee’s small counter, where customers can grab their caffeine fix, marks the entrance to the shop. Next are the metal racks of specialty food products that have been a long time lifesaver for local chefs who are in a pinch and unable to get ahold of smoked paprika powder or a quality aged balsamic. Next, on the right, are three large glass-doored refrigerators filled to the brim with beer brands from local breweries, rare European beers, and bottles of chilled wine. On the left is the line to place an order—where the man himself may be waiting.
Stein is well known for what many first-time customers assume is standoffishness but is, in fact, a deep and earnest focus on the success of his business, its staff, and the healthy following that has grown around it. His gruffness is a part of him, and people are drawn to him being himself. He has a dedicated fan/customer base. His deli’s monthly ads in the local paper, spoofing local and national social trends, are beloved—for example, his take on the infamous photo of Kim Kardashian that broke the Internet in 2014. There are even Reddit threads dedicated to celebrating and supporting him. “Dan is a fucking treasure,” one Reddit user surmised after learning Stein had been carjacked. “The man is a true New Orleans mensch,” another mentioned lovingly.
“This is his house. Like, he has a place that he goes and sleeps, but this is his home. This place is like the inside of his brain.”
“Dan once saw my wife and I waiting for a Lyft late at night and told us to get in his truck,” reads the top comment on one. “He brought us home and made us laugh the whole way home, I think it was even Mardi Gras season. The man is a true New Orleans mensch. Go buy a sandwich and some fancy beer.”
Despite Stein’s stature in New Orleans, it is ultimately the deli’s success that has the most significant effect on his self-esteem.
“I am Samson and the deli is my hair,” Stein says, referring to the biblical hero. “The success of this place and its functioning makes me feel good about myself. If this place is not doing its best, I don’t feel good about myself.” He has more pride in rolling up his sleeves to wash a table full of dishes at the deli than he ever did learning and practicing law.
New Orleans has a storied history of music, food, and liquor, but not beer. Just 20 years ago, only Abita and Heiner Brau represented the packaging breweries in Louisiana, and Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia could each only boast of one to two packaging breweries as well. Even today, Louisiana has only 40 craft breweries—placing it 49th in the U.S. in breweries by state and per capita.
“We weren’t a beer-rich place like California or Oregon or the Northeast,” Stein says. Louisiana didn’t break double-digit craft breweries until 2013, when there were 11 in operation, and it wasn’t until years after that when local companies produced enough of their own beer that demand for those craft brands started to swell.
“I am Samson and the deli is my hair.”
Though Stein’s focus has evolved from cheese to sandwiches to beer over the years, specialty imports and local distribution have always been a part of the deli’s secret sauce. When he opened the deli in 2007, he recognized the influx of new post-Katrina residents as coming from places where craft beer was plentiful. He saw a massive distribution gap that existed for craft beer in the South. Then he got to work doing what he does: connecting breweries with distributors, cultivating new relationships, and networking with beer-minded consumers and retailers.
Over the next decade, the New Orleans beer market boomed. Sales reps and retailers like Stein now see it as fully mature, if not oversaturated with options. The story of beer in New Orleans followed the national trend: Beer supply multiplied and demand slowed. Then the COVID pandemic made it even harder for distributed brands. Their workforces dwindled and inventory stockpiled. It forced Stein to reconsider how reliant he could be on beer, the very thing he helped build up.
Stein’s diversified business, dependent on the many different products that pique his interest—imported goods, sandwiches and prepared foods, deli meats and cheeses, beer, wine, and other specialty drinks—allowed him and his staff to weather the ups and downs of a notoriously fickle industry, the bursting of the craft beer bubble, and a pandemic. It didn’t all hang on beer.
“[Craft beer] is never gonna be the profit center that it was for this place, but the one thing I’ve been good at is knowing what’s good. That’s a great thing and a curse about working here all the time: I see what’s moving, what’s not moving. I hear it. I’m on it,” says Stein.
So, for now, it’s back to sandwiches.
Stein doesn’t have any specific predictions for the future of the deli, but that doesn’t mean he has no irons in the fire. Last summer, he (sort of) slipped out of the shop long enough to star in an episode of the newest season of “Queer Eye,” streaming now on Netflix. The tension of the episode centers around his conflicting commitments between his deli and the people in his life as the Fab Five help him address his wardrobe, work-life balance, and self-esteem.
“I measure myself at this place,” he says to the camera at one point in the episode, referencing his beloved deli. “If this place wasn’t successful, I wouldn’t be able to function in a way or feel comfortable enough around [people].”
Stein is a man who is loved and respected by his community. But he struggles to feel it for himself. The contrast is ironic, given that locals’ admiration for Stein is palpable to anyone who walks through the front door of the deli or speaks with someone who knows him. Longtime friend Mason Hereford, of sandwich shop Turkey and The Wolf, even asked Dan to officiate his wedding.
“He stayed up all night the night before and wrote this banger of a speech that completely roasted us. All the onlookers in stitches, laughing. It was very sweet, everything was right, none of the jokes went too far. We were laughing. And the rest of the day he was absolutely glowing,” Hereford recalls. “He was clearly so pleased that he truly succeeded in what he set out to do.”
And just in case asking him to officiate his wedding wasn’t enough, Hereford followed that up by getting an illustration of Stein tattooed on his arm.
Fox sees Stein's effort at the deli as an extension of his friend’s personality and care toward others. For a city that prides itself on diversity, inclusion, and the celebration of everyone, it’s a representation of what makes New Orleans special.
“[Stein’s Deli] is a place that welcomes all people,” Fox says. “The garbage men come and he gives them a sandwich and a drink. He takes care of the post office workers, he takes care of the delivery people. Literally, you could be the mayor of New Orleans and come here or you could be some gutter punk sitting at the same table, eating the same food. That’s what draws me to here.”
Words + Photos by Katie Sikora
