Little Puddles Everywhere
Welcome to Gourmet magazine, an independently owned digital food magazine that’s not affiliated with the Gourmet magazines of yore. Our Thursday editions are where we feature a great new recipe. Tuesday is for features.
IN THIS ISSUE: An upcoming L.A. talk on menus as maps, a highlight from our press release inbox folder, how the war on Iran is already affecting agriculture, and…our first event??
Appetizers
Delicity Of Quartz
Readers of the Angeleno persuasion, clear March 14th on your calendars. On the eve of the ides, the Culinary Historians of Southern California will host a talk by food writer (and editor at the cool new Synonym Magazine) Tien Nguyen called “Menus as Neighborhood Maps: How Los Angeles Restaurant Menus Tell Stories of Community Formation” that will draw significantly from the L.A. Public Library’s incredible collection.
I’m proud to be a dues-paying member of CHSC, the highbrow pirate ship steered by Charles Perry — variously Rolling Stone’s druggiest editor (1968-1974), Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery contributor (since 1981), Los Angeles Times food section reporter (1990-2008), and eminent translator of some of the only extant medieval cookbooks. Go! Join! And if you do, it might not be too late to register for the “Cantonese-American luncheon” at the Golden Dragon after the talk. —A.T.
Agenbite of Inbox
Nearly two months into our existence as a magazine, we have started to receive a steady flow of unsolicited PR pitches. We will share only the finest.
Meet the MagHugg:
“This woman-owned brand features a neoprene can cooler with a MagSafe-compatible ring, keeping drinks cold while your phone stays close for selfies and videos.” OK! —S.D.
Swords v. Plowshares
As if things weren’t bad enough, the economist and tinned fish enthusiast Adam Tooze points out in his latest Chartbook newsletter that the US-Israeli war on Iran is disrupting the global fertilizer supply, just as farmers across the Northern Hemisphere need it for spring planting. —S.D.
Friends With Bene-fêtes
A tip: Epicurean-level subscribers and above are about to get an invite to our first in-person event coming up later this month. Upgrade your tier to learn more before it’s too late! —C.G.W.
Little Puddles Everywhere
By Amiel Stanek
What’s in a trend?
This started as a “trend story.” I used to do them all the time, back when I was an assistant editor at a magazine. One of the more senior editors would say something sagacious in a meeting like, “I’m seeing chicories everywhere.” And that would sound pretty credible, because they did travel a lot, and they had a real expense account, and dining out was a part of their job. So everyone would mmmm and nod in agreement. Soon it would be on The Lineup, and then it might be assigned to me—hell YES, I would think—and then when I sat down with said editor, notebook in hand, to get the download of their worldly knowledge, it would become clear that what had been pitched as a verifiable trend was really more of a feeling.
My job at that point was to turn that feeling into a trend. I would look at our restaurant lists, comb over menus, and do a lot of scrolling, desperately searching for the data points I needed to prove this ultimately kind of arbitrary assertion—three to four dishes that felt distinct from one another, served by on-brand establishments (important!) that represented at least a degree of geographic diversity. And then, a bunch of emails, phone calls, memos, meetings, photoshoots, and edits later: a 300-ish word trend story in the early, ad-adjacent pages of said major food glossy. A thrill like no other.