Gourmet: RIP

October 5, 11:13 AMFood ExaminerEric Burkett

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Gourmet magazine is gone. Well, is about to be gone. Condé Nast, the magazine’s parent company, has announced the fabled food journal will close its doors after the November issue.

Probably any American with an interest in food has some memories of Gourmet. The magazine was my first real introduction to food writing and, certainly, it was an entry into good cooking. Well written recipes, lots of background, beautiful photos, and great writers – truly great writers – made Gourmet the paragon of culinary publishing. When I subscribed – yes, past tense – I looked forward to each issue and sat down and read the whole damned thing in a single sitting. But that was in the late 1980s and early 90s. Throughout my whole experience as a subscriber, I could never quite escape the sensation I was an interloper, a voyeur, peering into a place I didn’t belong as I pored over the magazine’s elegant pages.

Ads for Rolex watches and travel articles for places well outside my early 20s income – boutique hotels in London simply weren’t on my list of places to visit – left me feeling as if the magazine wasn’t mine. On the other hand, writers like the late Laurie Colwin brought the magazine squarely into my realm and I learned significant techniques from others such as Barbara Kafka (I still roast chicken at ridiculously high temperatures with great success thanks to her). When I left Vermont, where I was living for a time, I put my subscription on hold and renewed it a little later in Alaska. By that point, however, the magazine’s inconsistencies with my own life were too pronounced (I was living and cooking in a 150-square-foot cabin with no running water) and I didn’t bother to renew my subscription when the time came.

Did I miss anything? Ruth Reichl took charge of Gourmet in 1999 and made significant changes to both the content and the tone, but by then, I had moved on and renewing my subscription wasn’t really something I even considered. Other magazines, such as Saveur, began to crop up and I found I related more easily to their tone and content, but for the most part, I conducted my exploration of food through cookbooks, hundreds of them, and that’s been pretty much my modus operandi ever since.

I’m sorry to see Gourmet go; as a former newspaper reporter, I'm sorry to see any publication close. I’m sorrier, still, for those who will now be forced to find new jobs. But Gourmet's departure, though sad, will have little if any impact on my life.