When I have friends visiting Los Angeles and I ask where they’d like to eat, of all the incredible restaurants that the city has to offer — old Hollywood steakhouses, elite sushi counters, taco trucks, bustling Korean barbecue spots — there’s one place that always comes up these days: Erewhon.

Best known as a wonderland of intriguing specialty products with prices that feel like performance art — $24 coconut yogurt, $75 matcha, $18 bottles of camel milk — the health-focused grocery store opened in LA in 1969. But in 2011, it fell under new ownership that rebranded it as an ultra-premium food destination rather than a hippie-food depot, and in 2022, all hell broke loose when Hailey Bieber’s $21 strawberry smoothie debuted and became an instant phenomenon, bringing national, even global attention to the once-lowkey chain. New Erewhon locations opened one after another in Silver Lake, Culver City, Beverly Hills, Pasadena, West Hollywood, and Studio City, with several more planned for the future. Its reputation is now both aspirational and polarizing; it’s known for its elaborate Tonic Bar beverages (including a never-ending series of celeb collabs), upscale hot bar, high concentration of influencers, and adherence to a particular mushroom-supplement vision of West Coast wellness.

Despite becoming more and more omnipresent, the store seems to show no signs of waning interest from the public. I’m consistently fascinated by how many people in LA can afford to make the high-price-point chain their everyday grocer. A friend once casually told me she spends $2,500 at Erewhon every month. “On what?!” I asked, incredulous. “Oh, you know — food, my supplements,” she replied nonchalantly, as though spending $30,000 annually on groceries as a childless adult was perfectly normal. That exchange should perhaps have been a canary in the coal mine for what came next: the elite membership tiers that Erewhon announced in mid-April.

Erewhon’s long had a membership program that can be joined by anyone for a $200 annual fee, offering 10 percent cash back, exclusive offers and discounts from “leading lifestyle brands” (examples include Lululemon, Cadillac of Beverly Hills, and a variety of five-star hotels), and a free smoothie each month. But it recently unveiled significantly more exclusive membership tiers, including the Premier tier, automatically granted to those who spend $5,000 or more per year at the store, and the Reserve tier, for members who spend upwards of $15,000 annually. These new tiers offer priority checkout, free delivery, “Your Drink Made First” privileges at the smoothie counter, and for Reserve members, a free daily coffee and pastry, butler-like assistance (carrying your groceries to the car; saving you a table in the cafe area), and most intriguingly, access to a “personal in-store concierge.”