An Acquired Taste
On the occasion of Gourmet magazine’s quinoctogintennial
We are bringing Gourmet back from the dead.
Condé Nast, in its monied magnificence, failed to renew its trademark for the magazine. Now it is ours—and yours too if you subscribe. This new incarnation is lean, mean, and worker-owned, and we will be sharing profits with our contributors. We want everyone to dine at our table of success.
Who are we? A collective of writers, editors, and designers who love to cook and eat, bon vivants who aspire to never be boring on the palate or the page. We will be delivering, piping hot or pleasantly cool, a newsletter to your inbox twice weekly. One will contain a recipe from our brilliant squad culinaire; the other will deliver investigations, scoops, dispatches, postcards, love letters, decoder rings, instruction manuals, vibe reports, archival cuts, menu doodles, paeans, diatribes, and gossip from the front lines of the human appetite. We will not use AI, because it has no taste.
Like any good meal, our most basic aspiration is to fill an empty space. Food is the stuff of life, and over the last 20 years has gone from a niche concern (beyond the “everybody eats” of it all) to a pillar of popular culture. And yet we’ve seen the number of outlets devoted to exploring it with genuine curiosity and delight dwindle over that same period. The legacy brands largely botched the transition from print to digital, chasing the pipe dream of infinite glassy eyeballs, and diluted their missions in the process. In an attempt to reach everyone, they no longer speak to anyone. Least of all, us: people who really care about food and cooking. Now, 16 years after it was unceremoniously folded, Gourmet has become a symbol of a food media that once was, a name sighed nostalgically to evoke a delicious absence.
This new Gourmet will be a return to form in some ways—fascinating, well-written, eccentric, delicious—but we will rely directly on our readers to keep the lights on, and avoid the hierarchies, inequities, and bloat of the ancien régime. We would rather write for a cohort of fellow travelers, passionate home cooks and nerds, than chase the dream of infinite scale.
We’re obviously not the only ones seeking alternatives to the Old Ways of Doing Things. Countless individual writers and cooks have set out on their own with a Substack, TikTok, or YouTube channel to disseminate recipes and tell stories about food. We love what many of them are doing.
But not everybody wants to be a singer-songwriter—some of us want to be in a band. There is something about a shared effort, a wobbly but recognizable editorial voice, a publication that is a stage, not a microphone, that we missed, and wanted to try to make. There is something, in other words, about a magazine.
In doing this, we are joining the ranks of other independent media collectives like Vittles and Best Food Blog, and drawing particular inspiration from fellow worker-owned shops like Hell Gate, Coyote, 404, and Defector. Solidarity (salsa verde?) forever.
The timing, too, seems right. When Gourmet first launched 85 years ago, in January of 1941, with a big strange illustration of a boar’s head on its cover, the Fascist pigs were on the march. Within a few years, the classical colonial empires would finish dying their prolonged and violent deaths, the world would be transformed under America’s hegemony, and the wheat and milk and Coca-Cola of the semi-automated food industry would flush into the diets of half the world. We still live in that system, but it’s difficult to shake the sense that a change is afoot. The espressos have been ordered, but the bill has not yet come.
In these uncertain times we say: digestifs?
— Sam Dean, Nozlee Samadzadeh, Amiel Stanek, Alex Tatusian, and Cale Weissman
Correction: 1941 was 85 years ago, not 75 years ago. We regret the error, and commit to counting correctly in all future endeavors.
THIS WEEK: Our inaugural feature, on California's most gubernatorial vineyard, and our first recipe (spoiler alert—it's beige).