RIP Gourmet Magazine
Posted 10-05-2009 8:39 pm
by Admin Admin
I was shocked and saddened this morning to hear the news that Conde Nast Publications is shutting down Gourmet.
It’s a magazine I’ve subscribed to forever, it seems like, and I have a serious girl crush on editor Ruth Reichl due to following her writing over the years. In fact, I just saw her in person last week at an event she did at a local bookstore here in Seattle in support of the new Gourmet cookbook. It seems a little surreal now. Now, as I’ve posted previously, I’m much more of an eater than a cook (although I’m been working on changing that), so to me, the best parts of Gourmet were not the recipes (although I did clip some of those from time to time and even made a few) but rather the articles—about travel, about restaurants, about chefs, about what was new and interesting in the food world. And of course the beautiful photographs, especially the covers. I will miss those terribly. When I was planning my 50th birthday trip to Paris last year, I positively *devoured* the September 2008 issue on Paris that arrived in my mailbox a few weeks before my trip. I even called Chez L’ami Jean from Seattle so I could be sure of getting a reservation since Ruth Reichl raved about it in that issue (and was rather crushed when it didn’t turn out to be quite as good as I’d hoped). I still remember the day about five or so years ago when I met with an editor I’d become friendly with over the years who was at the time an editor at Gourmet. She showed me around the offices and the test kitchens at their offices in the Conde Nast building. We were sitting in a conference room talking about food and travel in the Pacific Northwest when I stopped talking at the sight of Ruth Reichl walking down the hall outside the conference room. I’m sure my eyes got big, and my friend turned around to see what I was looking at. I said something like, oh wow, that’s Ruth Reichl, and she laughed in recognition of my obvious crush. I would imagine they got that a lot at Gourmet. It’s going to be weird to be in New York next week for the Conde Nast Traveler events they hold every year for the Top Travel Specialists. We spend part of the time in the Conde Nast building and I’m sure the mood will be quite somber.
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