Condé Nast is home to some of the world's most iconic brands, including Vogue, The New Yorker, GQ, Vanity Fair, Wired, Architectural Digest, Condé Nast Traveler, and La Cucina Italiana.
When Condé Nast offered Ruth Reichl the top position at Gourmet Magazine in January of 1999, it was announced that Ruth Reichl would leave her post as restaurant critic of The New York Times to become editor-in-chief of Gourmet.
Gourmet was America's oldest epicurean magazine, but at first, Reichl declined, thinking she was a writer, not a manager, and was doing just fine as a food critic for the New York Times. Even so, she had been reading Gourmet since she was eight, and it had inspired her career. So she thought, how could she say no?
Reichl, a native New Yorker, started working as a chef in Berkeley, California, in the 1970s; she began writing about food, at New West and then the Los Angeles Times, before returning to New York. Gourmet paid her six times her Times salary plus perks, and Condé Nast publisher Si Newhouse directed her to rebuild the magazine.
In this memoir, Reichl offers revealing glimpses of her parents and life, but the main focus is on the process of “magazine making,” which means turning an old-fashioned book into a modern, cutting-edge monthly.
Reichl’s way of describing her excitement and offering insights on her talented staff, including quirks and infights, made you feel like an insider as you read the book.
She describes the goings-on of the Conde Nast cafeteria, midnight parties for chefs, expensive annual meetings, and providing food to 9/11 firefighters.
She also writes about some of the wells know articles like David Rakoff’s “Some Pig,” about Jews and bacon, and David Foster Wallace’s classic “Consider the Lobster,” on the ethics of eating, taught her that “when something frightens me, it is worth doing.”
The book looked deeply at a dream job that ended with the early 2000s recession when delining ads forced the publication's closing.
