NIGELLA SHOPS.(The Talk of the Town)

Nigella Lawson, Britain's most telegenic cook, was in town last week to talk about her new Food Network show, "Nigella Feasts." The Food Network hopes to duplicate Lawson's success as Britain's "domestic goddess" with the American masses. But is there a place for a domestic goddess in America's kitchen? That was the question hanging over the frigid air of a Gristede's at Ninth Avenue and Twenty-fourth Street, where Lawson spent an hour assisting a reporter in choosing the menu for a dinner party he wanted to throw for his wife's birthday. If her divinity could shine through the decidedly un-Olympian surroundings in which New Yorkers shop for supper, then she might have a shot here.

On arriving, Lawson said, inaccurately, "I look like a man in drag." She was wearing a black suede jacket, a long black skirt, black suede boots, and a blue cashmere sweater. She glided over the warped linoleum inside the automatic door, past refuse-filled shopping carts, and went straight to a rack of corn chips. "Everything is so big in America!" she said. "It makes Britain look like toytown."

Lawson is not a professional cook; her appeal derives, in part, from a tony background (her father was Margaret Thatcher's Chancellor of the Exchequer) and from her experience as a mother (she has two young children) and as the wife of the art collector Charles Saatchi (her first husband, John Diamond, died of throat cancer in 2001). Her specialty is comfort food, and what she calls "food kitsch"--for example, fried peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches.

"Now, I would be quite happy with these thighs," Lawson said pensively, settling her fingertips on a package of chicken pieces. "Maybe with some honey and thyme. You can eat like Henry VIII."

She set off looking for an appetizer: "Surely they'll have a pumpkin, no?" No such luck. "Squash, then, turned into a salad with radicchio, feta, and parsley. And we'll roast some leeks and garlic cloves with the birds. Now, is there feta?"

She located the cheese case. "Blue-cheese crumbles! How extraordinary! One would have thought you could crumble it ...