Farewell, Gourmet

In 2002, when selecting a restaurant to complete my cooking school’s externship requirements, I picked up Gourmet’s 2001 October issue, its restaurant issue. Already dog-eared, the magazine opened nearly on its own to the list of what the editors had deemed as the best 50 restaurants in the country that year. I settled on an image of a dish: a calamari salad seasoned with the unlikely combination of Thai basil, fried shiitake mushrooms, and pineapple. Wow, I thought, this is different. I can really learn from this restaurant. A few months later, I headed east from California to Boston to work at Radius.

Although Michael Schlow’s restaurant taught me quite a bit (mostly about stamina, brunoise, and the labor involved in making that calamari salad) this story isn’t about Radius. It’s about Gourmet. For me and many others, the magazine served as a taste maker and a story teller. Sure, at times the magazine could be as baroque as its title, but just as often it was filled with down-to-earth stories about food and families, chefs and restaurants. In the 1990s, for example, it reported a trend in Britain where old pubs were turning into dynamic eateries. Today, as we well know, gastropubs (whether or not owners embrace the label) are going strong in the United States.

So yesterday’s news that Conde Nast has decided to fold the magazine along with three others was disheartening, not just to the media world but also to the food world.

From the CIA, President Tim Ryan issued this response:

"I am very surprised and saddened by the announcement. Gourmet was a high quality magazine and an iconic brand. Its demise is certainly not reflective of the public’s interest in food & wine, which is at an all time high; but more about the challenge of a print based business model in a digital age. Gourmet is just one of many print business dominos which are likely to fall in the next few years."

Yet Gourmet does not leave a growing audience of food fans without material to read. Celebrity-driven cooking publications are growing at an incredible rate. New food blogs and food-blog aggregators launch seemingly every day. Community-supported recipe sites give consumers instant access to thousands of recipes. And sites such as Yelp.com are impinging upon restaurant reviews as a source of information on a restaurant’s competency level.

Maybe we all benefit from this democratization of food information. Maybe, in the end, the overhead for all of test kitchens and travel budgets proved to be too expensive to justify keeping the title going (even though its circulation was growing). Maybe I’ll never want to waste a perfectly good tomato on an exercise in brunoise. But when I was a line cook, I always felt pride knowing that I worked at establishments that were good enough to gain approval from the likes of Gourmet. It made the hard work, long hours, and low pay seemingly worth while. I’ll miss the publication. And I sure bet that I’m not alone.