What a different food world it was before celebrity chefs became “rock stars” and social media reduced old-style critics to chopped liver.
Ruth Reichl’s new book, “Save Me the Plums,” is a lively, sweet-and-sour memoir of her decade as editor-in-chief of Gourmet magazine — a fabled tenure that followed her previous years as New York Times restaurant critic.
It’s also a quiet lamentation for a world that we’ll never see again.
Reichl’s episodic account of life at Condé Nast under its enigmatic owner, the late S.I. Newhouse, is a fun-to-read romp through a time when glossy monthly magazines reigned supreme and when top editors ruled the magazines with royal privilege.
She colorfully bares the entitlement and waste that defined the Condé Nast lifestyle: A retiring travel editor “was neither a writer nor an editor and devoted most of her time representing the magazine at travel conventions.” She unintentionally echoes Henry Hill’s “I never voted, I never paid taxes” courtroom speech in “GoodFellas” — “For 10 years, I never balanced a checkbook [or] made a reservation,” because someone was always there to do it for her.
But the subtext is more quietly compelling. Although “Save Me the Plums” doesn’t hammer the point home, Reichl tells The Post, “As food became part of popular culture, young people now are driving the restaurant business. The most important restaurant-goers today are 25 to 35. They have big incomes but no families. They want a party.”
Compare that to early in Reichl’s tenure, when then-publisher Gina Sanders explained to her why Cartier and Tiffany advertised in Gourmet: “Fine restaurants are the only places for which Americans still dress up. Where else are women going to wear their makeup and jewels?”
How quaint it sounds in 2019, when a “jacket” requirement can mean a zip-up running top, like a woman’s that I once saw at Per Se.
When Reichl took up the reins, gastronomy was still mainly about food, cooking and the pleasure to be taken from them. But by 2009, when the magazine folded, the culinary scene was increasingly politicized about such issues as sustainability, health risks and perceptions of human and animal exploitation.
We can partly thank, or blame, Reichl for this: She published articles on lobsters’ suffering as they were boiled, and on the link between trans-fats and cancer. This alienated some readers and advertisers. But Gourmet was still mostly about food — unlike today, when much “food” writing is more about “fair-trade” sourcing, cultural “misappropriation” and unequal pay for waiters and cooks.
Soon after 9/11, Gourmet came up with the idea to throw parties for chefs to reward them for helping in the Ground Zero relief effort. Reichl writes, “They didn’t start till midnight and they went on until the last reveler — usually the sweet, younger, not-yet-famous Tony Bourdain — staggered into the dawn. This was, of course, before the #MeToo moment tore down the curtain and exposed the ugliness behind the kitchen door.”
And how: I know chefs who no longer go to parties without their wives and others who no longer party at all.
Gourmet photo shoots “required weeks of preparation” and expense. Today, cupcake Instagrams posted from cheap cellphones have more influence on younger diners than any magazine spread could.
The rise of the Web and social media shadows the second half of the book, when Gourmet is losing readers and ads. Reichl was dismayed when Condé Nast set up a site called Epicurious that was allowed to steal all of Gourmet’s recipes. Soon after, Gourmet set up its own site to compete with its corporate cousin. The skirmish seems quaint in today’s world, where stand-alone Web sites have vast reach and readership.
The party ended when Newhouse pulled Gourmet’s plug in November 2009.
One poignant line expresses Reichl’s sadness over not having spent more time with her beloved son during her editing days. It just as well could apply to the era: “The time was gone, and it was never coming back.”
