Welcome to The Pantry – The #1 Gourmet specialty foods shop in Fairfield, CT
Here at The Pantry our main goal is to provide our customers with superior food choices along with the legendary customer service you’d expect in an upscale market. We have a bustling multi – faceted shop in downtown with award winning pastries, spectacular prepared food choices, an amazing deli & salad bar, specialty & mainstream groceries, top quality meats & seafood, produce & some sundries. What sets us apart from the competition? Great customer service, great food, great employees. Our take home food is equivalent or better than most restaurants at a fraction of the cost & our pricing throughout the store is competitive with bigger supermarkets. You can view some of our food right here on this site or on our You Tube channel along with some recipes & instructional video.
More than Just great food
Also an enjoyable atmosphere
The Pantry - People, about our shop + some fun facts!
Meet the people behind the scenes & Pantry tips & info!
Andy is the co-owner of The Pantry & began the pastry department at The Pantry. I’m also a hack plumber, master of silicone, decent carpenter & P/T psychiatrist, and now webmaster! Here I am on a tiny peninsula in Lake Como, Italy. By the way, that’s a huge smile on my face:))
Mel, my wife of 28+ years also has and does work with us currently @ The Pantry. Her keen (and beautiful) eyes help us out front in the store.
Growing up in the restaurant business here in CT, I have spent my life immersed in the food industry in one facet or another. (My family owned a large local restaurant & seafood market in Bridgeport) After making the decision to leave my own family’s businesses I set up shop in Hyde Park, NY at the CIA where I graduated in 1983. From that point forward, I have worked in restaurants, hotels, clubs & private residences from New York to Paris to Los Angeles. My travels and experiences have given me a deep appreciation for good food and respect for ingredients and the process of cooking professionally. I am fortunate enough to have a talented group of people working along side me to “Bring it all together” every week throughout the year. The quality, quantity & variety of food being prepared daily is astounding. During the months of November & December the workload can be crushing & demanding, but we all pull together to make it happen. Many people ask me: What school/program is the best? or how do you learn pastry or food? First – you need to have passion. Without a love of the ingredients, foods, varieties of cuisine & a humbling self knowledge that you’ll never even come close to knowing it all, the rest of the food business will incinerate you. The passion for good food is what matters. Andy is retired as of 12-31-2023 from day to day, but is still active as co-owner of The Pantry.
Kirsten is the Executive Chef, and she has been there since pre-opening and has a number of talents aside from being a great chef and a great person. She is the “Martha Stewart” of our shop, and has a way with flowers & displays and is just as calm and collected as a librarian even when the heat is on in the kitchen. Her former boss informed me that she was “The jewel in the rough” – Damn was he ever spot on. She is the heart & soul of the store. This is a photo of Kirsten & Dale (her father) sharing a sunset by the beach in CT.
Kirsten is also a CIA graduate, and has worked her way across the country and back in many of the finest food establishments around including San Ysidro Ranch in Santa Barbara, CA & Rough Creek Lodge near Dallas, TX. She is a native of Vermont, and is our biggest proponent of locally sourced & organic ingredients. Kirsten became our business partner after about the 7 – 8-year mark. We decided it was best we all remain glued together.
Paul is the GM at the store and has been employed for many years at The Pantry. He has spent the vast majority of his life involved in the food business in restaurants, hotels & private clubs all over the US. He is well versed in customer service & goes the extra mile to do the right thing with every situation. He enjoys a round of golf weekly when the weather is agreeable.
Chef Daniel Dhimitër Monroe,
Growing up in a single parent home, in Bridgeport CT, where your mother is expected to work long hours to help pay for the roof over your head and some food in the kitchen, you learn how to cook for yourself. Thankfully, the iconic Julia Childs made an impact on my life at a young age.
Food became my passion and although I took several kitchen jobs, since the age of 15, experience was still lacking. I joined the US Army and became a cook, and set forth my passions to learn as much as possible.
After that life changing experience, a stop at the esteemed Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, NY to earn a Bachelor’s degree. During my studies I took all the side jobs I could, as well as an extern at “K-Paul’s” Restaurant with another television icon, the world renown Chef Paul Prudhomme. After CIA I worked my way through CT’s best kitchens, most notably Sous Chef at “Zinc”, Under Chef Denise Appel in New Haven before landing the sous chef position here at “The Pantry”, where now I’ve grown to the position of Chef de Cuisine. Creating as many high level, farm driven, healthy, fun dishes as possible.
My passion for food is only trumped by desire to be the greatest father to my two daughters, Athena and Alani and loving husband to my amazing wife Iraida.
Chef de Cuisine
Veronica is the head pastry chef at The Pantry and has been working here just over a year now. Before she started with us full time in September 2019, Veronica had interned here during her semester breaks from school to gain experience.
Veronica’s passion of baking has been around for as long as she can remember. Growing up she began baking all Greek pastries with her mom. Since then, her love for baking has grown and matured. This passion lead Veronica to attend Culinary Arts Institute in Hyde Park, NY. While at CIA, she had interned at Google in Mountainview, CA. Graduating from CIA in 2017 with a degree in Baking & Pastry Arts.
Directly after graduating, Veronica started working as a Pastry Chef at Scratch Baking in Milford. Here she learned and perfected rustic breads, various pastries, while introducing her own recipes. Realizing that she wanted to expand on what she has learned in a higher, more professional environment where she could specialize in her small desserts, specialty cakes and cupcakes. This brought her back to The Pantry where she continues to develop and perfect her craft… especially in the presentation of her desserts.
When not working, she enjoys spending time with her niece and nephew.
Thierry co-owns the store with Andy & Kirsten. Thierry grew up surrounded with good food as his mom is a great chef. He has worked the better part of his life in the specialty foods business. Thierry buys the groceries that are on the shelf at The Pantry amongst other things. Thierry has retired as of 12-31-2023.
With the number of people we serve every day I’d say our feedback is 99.5% positive. Some of the most common complaints we hear: The parking lot is terrible….Well, it’s definitely challenging at times – but at least we have one (actually we have 2! There’s one behind the store also, off of Miller Street) so, in total we have about 30 spaces. That’s why our food is so great – because it makes it worth the aggravation that you sometimes get in the parking lot:)
Holidays & Busy Weekends: another typical issue that people experience at The Pantry…”Our rules for holiday ordering & cutoff/blackout dates. You’d be surprised (actually amazed) at the quantity of food that our little 1000 Sq. Ft. Kitchen can pump out. We decided a long time ago that bigger is not necessarily better – (unless you are on vacation, or they are heaping extra French fries on your plate)….We intentionally limit the amount of business that we take on busy weekends to: ♣ keep our staff happy & sane ♣ keep our food fresh, safe and delish ♣ keep our customers satisfied with food that is prepared with care. (Love ♥ actually) It’s probably counter-intuitive to what every business person thinks, but it’s worked for us 99.9% of the time. Should you find yourself in that .01% place – we are truly sorry. If you plan ahead, you will find that we are easy to get along with.
Special orders: we handle tons, and we are very accommodating. There are certain things we simply cannot do, or do not want to do. The only way to be profitable is to consistently make great food over and over again following a recipe that is good. We think our recipes are good or we change them or don’t continue to make them. We can’t be everything to everyone, & we can’t be a private chef to one. We like to think that you’ll love our food, our people & our service.
You will still hate the parking lot though!
Here are some tasty tidbits about our shop you probably would never think possible! Updated 7/01/2023
- We use about 25,000 pounds of butter a year! Mostly in the bakery.
- Since we opened, we have made over 3,000,000 chocolate chip cookies utilizing about 2.5 tons of chocolate chips annually. (That is one of many types of cookies we make daily)
- We make about 1500 – 1800 salads every week @ our salad bar. That’s fresh.
- We have made over 175,000 macaroni & cheeses in various incarnations.
- We discovered that it takes about 5 years for a store our size to finish using up 125,000 custom logo coffee cups. Yeah, we won’t be doing that again!
- We use just under 8000 quarts of heavy cream a year.
- Our most popular pie (Key Lime Pie) began as a mistake order that was never picked up. We started selling them & have never looked back. Thankful for happy accidents!!
- Over the years we have hand built well over a half million appetizers, for tastes, parties around town & for our own kitchen.
- We have turned out over 75,000 pints of store made ice creams & sorbets in a range of about 25 flavors. Sadly we have had to discontinue ice cream in 2023 <:()
- Most of our kitchen crew has been around a long time. We have several CIA graduates in the back cooking and baking.
Customer Testimonials
Hundreds of happy customers