One of the many things that Karl Marx got wrong was overlooking the socialist fervor of high-end diners. Yet there they’ve been this whole time, at the bar at Stissing House in the Hudson Valley, downing bone marrow oysters and biding their time.
Their opportunity arrived in January, when the bourgeoisie took their eyes off the means of production. Last year, food writer Sam Dean discovered that, back in 2021, Condé Nast had failed to renew the trademark for Gourmet, the now 85-year-old magazine they shuttered in 2009. He gathered four other foodies in their thirties, formed a worker-owned corporation, and relaunched the Gourmet website. They issued a cri de guerre to revolutionaries from the courtyard garden of the French Laundry to the leather banquettes of Le Bernardin: Gourmands of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but some old Gourmet recipes for veal hearts that are stuck in Condé Nast’s database.
Delivering two newsletters a week, the people’s Gourmet declared:
When Gourmet first launched 85 years ago, in January of 1941, with a big, strange illustration of a boar’s head on its cover, the Fascist pigs were on the march. Within a few years, the classical colonial empires would finish dying their prolonged and violent deaths, the world would be transformed under America’s hegemony, and the wheat and milk and Coca-Cola of the semi-automated food industry would flush into the diets of half the world. We still live in that system, but it’s difficult to shake the sense that a change is afoot. The espressos have been ordered, but the bill has not yet come.
In its first week, that bill arrived in the form of a long travel story about trying to understand California governor Gavin Newsom via wine tastings at his Napa vineyards:
If you squint through the blurred vision of many days drinking high-alcohol California reds, this all begins to feel like a mirror image of another Boomer-built, creaky, embattled libertine institution, one led by elites who insist that their taste is the taste of the masses, that an oaky chard, a fat cab, markets for everything, and drone strikes abroad are what the people want. The fate of the Democratic Party of Newsom and the wine culture of the ’90s are both uncertain; Napa Gav’s lanky frame is woven through both.
The people’s Gourmet also offered tips to the proletariat, such as avoiding Zabar’s smoked fish counter, where the “sandwich I got from the cafe was made with bullshit machine-sliced salmon.” The intro to a recipe for Baked Rice Pudding rails against capitalism’s productivity demands made through its dehumanizing “one pan,” “six-ingredient,” “twenty-minute” come-ons.
“Why wash two pans when you can kinda just huck all the ingredients into one and call it dinner? The answer for at least some of us is: Because we want to. Because we actually like cooking. Because the kitchen is a place where we enjoy spending time, and we don’t want to be hustled, hacked, and otherwise optimized out of it.”
I, of course, love this. Because I am a college-educated, urban, progressive who was saved from suffering through some “bullshit machine-sliced salmon.” Gourmet is snarky and fun, like the magazines I loved as a kid in the 1980s and 1990s. It’s more than a last gasp before the end. It’s fingernails growing on the corpse of Jonathan Gold.
When Saveur’s former junior test kitchen assistant, Kat Craddock, found an investor so she could buy the magazine in 2023, it seemed like a win for food journalism. Her Saveur is great, but it doesn’t make me want to take to the streets to stop restaurateurs from expanding into chains. Gourmet is the resistance I need. Especially when I’ll have to read from my eventual bunker, hiding from the Fascist pigs, surviving on saltines and canned foie.
