The New York Observer » Gourmet

Golden Delicious: Ruth Reichl to Run Gilt Groupe Foodie Site

We hear former Gourmet editor in chief Ruth Reichl is staffing up a food spin-off of Gilt Groupe, the luxury discount retailer Web site. The project remains in stealth mode, but one might expect the site to look like the Gilt MANual blog, which pairs original lifestyle content with links to Gilt Groupe's men's wear Read More

On The First Anniversary of Gourmet Closing, Ruth Reichl Remembers

This morning former Gourmet editor Ruth Reichl remembered the one-year anniversary of the day her magazine closed. "Foggy, melancholy morning," she wrote on Twitter. "Gourmet's end one year today. Fat fluffy pancakes, drizzled maple syrup, crisp smoky Benton's bacon. Full."

Last year around this time, Ms. Reichl gave a few interviews to talk about Read More

Life After Luxury Advertising at Condé Nast: Bon Appétit, Carol Smith

On Sunday afternoon, Carol Smith was thinking about what to order for lunch, but she already knew. She was sitting on the booth side of a table facing the center of the dining room that was set up in Avery Fisher Hall for Fashion Week. The space was called the Bon Appétit Café, and it Read More

Alley-Oop, Sports Illustrated Hits the iPad

Sports Illustrated joins Time magazine today as the first Time Inc. titles to have iPad applications.

Both apps are priced at $4.99, to compete with Wired. But Wired is dropping the price of its app to $3.99 for customers who purchased the first issue. Neither publisher has decided on subscription pricing for the iPad yet.

“We’ll be Read More

Gourmet Lives! ‘Pity’ Says Ruth Reichl

Conde Nast is bringing Gourmet back in the form of an app.

It's an experiment for Conde Nast: They'll take a magazine they folded (because they said it lost too much money) and replace the printed product and the employees they laid off there with a big internet community. And the Gourmet archives.

The "Gourmet Live" app Read More

Gourmet at the Grocery Store; Conde Nast Teams Up on New Food Magazine

Condé Nast is teaming up with parent company Adavance Publication's Parade magazine on a new product to be launched in the fall — Dash magazine, which will run as an insert in 100 newspapers around the country starting in November. Dash will also have an online component that will launch in September.

The launch comes after Read More

No Substitute for Ruth Reichl’s Gourmet; Ad Pages Non-Transferable

In January 2009, a Condé Nast publisher spoke with The Observer about how the company should split resources between Bon Appetit and Gourmet.

“As companies across all industries streamline redundancies, you’ve got Bon Ap and Gourmet, and which has the stronger name? Gourmet, clearly,” the publisher said. “As a brand you want Gourmet. It’s got Read More

Exiled Condé Editors: The Lost Years

So what happens to an editrix after Si Newhouse shuts down her magazine?

Dominique Browning wrote in The Times Magazine last weekend that her life went into a free fall after House & Garden was shuttered in 2007. She details how she spent much of her time in pajamas, how she thought about death, how she Read More

Reichl Rehashes, Gourmet Staffers Move On

Ruth Reichl spoke with Leonard Lopate on WNYC, addressing the fate of print and, of course, the final days of Gourmet. Ms. Reichl, who edited the revered food magazine for 10 years before it folded in October, reiterated the shock she's discussed in previous interviews ("It was a done deal"), as Read More

Gourmet‘s Cookbooks Find a New Home

The end of Gourmet was not bad for everyone: It was not bad for the the culinary collection at NYU's Fales Library, for example. Fales has used a $14,000 gift from cookbook author Roseanne Gold to purchase the late magazine's 3,500 research cookbooks, The Times reports.

"I got on the horn right Read More

Will Ruth Reichl Continue Her Television Adventures?

Since Gourmet folded in early October, Condé Nast has pledged to continue to market the iconic brand. Gourmet’s cookie cookbook is due to come out early next year, and a PBS show, Gourmet’s Adventures with Ruth, is in the middle of a 10-episode run.

That show’s first season is nearly over. So will the magazine’s Read More

The Fall of Print, in Pictures

If anything good is going to come out of the decimated print-media world, it will be elegiac newsroom photos from soon-to-be-former employees.

Last year, Martin Gee posted the "Reduction in Force" series—a Flickr archive of of the San Jose Mercury News office as a shadow of its former self. Now, Kevin DeMaria has created Read More

The Si Way

Just eight years after Si Newhouse spent tens of millions to move Condé Nast into 4 Times Square, he was ready to move out.

In the first week of October 2007, Mr. Newhouse signed a deal with the real estate developer Douglas Durst to build a new tower for his company over a platform Read More

Ruth Reflects on Time in ‘Wonderland’

John Koblin spoke with Ruth Reichl last night at a posthumous party for Gourmet. In between greeting colleagues and navigating the coat check, she talked about her plans for a book on Conde Nast.

“It’s a very rarefied world,” she said. “It was a world that most people—I had no idea that this particular Read More

Ruthie in Wonderland! Ruth Reichl Reflects on Conde Nast

On a very chilly, rainy Thursday night, Ruth Reichl was hugging Dianne Weist on the third floor of the Time Warner Center, at the back of the restaurant A Voce. While embracing, Ms. Weist was removing a bulky winter jacket and a big red scarf. A handler asked Ms. Weist if she was interested in Read More