It looks like an iconic Acland Street shop may have bitten the dust. As I was waiting for my wife D as she perused the Polish papers in the Acland Street newsagency on the weekend, I noticed that the Edelwiess Delicatessen wasn't open at a time it would normally be. A notice was taped to the front door saying the landlord had taken possession of the premises, chilling words indeed.

Edelwiess Delicatessen has been in Acland Street for as long as I have been going there and I'm sure its history goes back further than that to a time when new migrants from Poland, Hungary and other European countries settled in St Kilda. When I first discovered the shop, it had virtually unobtainable goods from overseas. I remember purchasing a tin of foie gras from here in the seventies to top some Tornadoes Rossini when I was going through a French phase, that was virtually unobtainable anywhere else.

As the migrant population spread out from St Kilda, a trendier crowd moved in and in the face of competition from specialist food retailers such as The Essential Ingredient and Simon Johnson, not to mention the well stocked delis of the nearby Prahran Market, Edelwiess began to change. They installed seats and a coffee machine and offered fresh salads and homemade cakes to take home, but it appears to no avail.

I don't know if the shop will open again, I for one hope it does, and judging by the number of Melbourne bloggers that have written about it, I'm not the only one who will miss it, but it may be that the landscape that enabled this shop to thrive has moved too far for it to ever recapture its glory days as one of the go-to shops for hard to get items and wasn't able to move far enough away from that model to succeed.