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For decades, the trademark for Gourmet magazine was held by Condé Nast, the publisher of Vogue, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and more.

Even after the magazine was shuttered in 2009, devastating the food literati, the company renewed the trademark. Until recently.

On Tuesday, Gourmet will be rebooted as an online newsletter on the platform Ghost. Like its eponymous predecessor, it will prioritize publishing words and recipes with complexity. Unlike old Gourmet, it will be operated by five 30-something journalists, without the infrastructure of a media conglomerate.

The new Gourmet joins a wave of worker-owned publications eschewing corporations such as Condé Nast, with journalists taking on more entrepreneurial roles as large media employers shrink or sell off. (Hell Gate, 404 Media and Defector also follow this model.) Contributors will be paid for the work they produce, plus a portion of profits from new subscriptions that their work attracts.

Founded in 1941, Gourmet magazine was one of several titles closed during the financial crisis. Edited by Ruth Reichl for its last decade, the magazine was more intellectual, worldly and elite than, say, Bon Appétit, its Condé cousin, which is still in circulation. It published David Foster Wallace’s famous essay “Consider the Lobster” and the Pulitzer Prize winner Annie Proulx’s first short story. James Beard was Gourmet’s restaurant critic for years.

In this spirit, the new founders dismissed questions about their immediate video or podcast plans. “Good writing is really cool,” said Nozlee Samadzadeh, a co-founder who is employed as a software engineer at The New York Times. “We’re going to see where we go after that.”

  • alyaza [they/she]@beehaw.orgOPM
    2·
    7 hours ago

    you can subscribe over here:

    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.