For 80 years, 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.
Last year, the writer Sam Dean, formerly of The Los Angeles Times and Bon Appétit, was browsing the U.S. trademark database, as one does, when he discovered the Gourmet trademark had not been renewed in 2021.
Mr. Dean began looking into how to claim it, gradually partnering on the trademark application with four others who shared his disappointment in modern food media. Their careers began after the golden age of print magazines ended, but before video and social media radically changed the landscape, making everything shorter, simpler and more swipeable.
“If we wanted to try something, the time was now,” Alex Tatusian, a creative director based in Los Angeles and one of the five co-founders, said during a group interview. “It was a bit of an ‘Oceans 11’ kind of moment after that.”
Condé Nast did not respond to requests for comment on Monday about the trademark.
The new Gourmet joins a wave of worker-owned publications eschewing corporations such as Condé Nast, journalists taking on more entrepreneurial roles as large media employees 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.”
The new Gourmet’s recipes will also target more home-chef types than harried parents grasping for weeknight relief.
“It’s for people who really want to spend an afternoon in the kitchen and make something really delicious,” said Amiel Stanek, a former editor at Bon Appétit who is a founder. “Not people who are looking to minimize the amount of time they’re spending in the kitchen or find a faster, easier, happier way to get dinner on the table.”
Before announcing the reboot, Mr. Stanek reached out to Ms. Reichl, who was a restaurant critic at The Times before leaving to edit Gourmet in 1999. This was nerve-racking, he said, because “she is Gourmet.” He worried she’d think their idea was disrespectful or too scrappy for the storied title. Instead, she was pleased.
Gourmet “deserves to rise from the ashes,’” she said, both to him and to The New York Times in an email on Monday.
“If Condé Nast has allowed the trademark to lapse and they’ve managed to secure it, more power to them,” Ms. Reichl wrote, adding that she has no insight into the upcoming content but loved “the idea of a new generation taking it on, and I hope they do it proud.”
Although, to Mr. Stanek, “she was also like: ‘You’re going to get sued,’” he said.
Asked about the prospect of legal action from Condé Nast, another co-founder, the journalist Cale Weissman, said they “feel confident” in their plan after consulting with a lawyer.
Subscriptions will begin at $7 per month. The founders said they will not sell advertising, have not sought investment and have funded the effort with “a couple thousand dollars” of their own money and donations from friends.
The co-founders declined to share future article subjects, but said they plan to publish one feature and one recipe per week, in addition to bonus content for higher-tiered subscribers.
They did share a blocky and idiosyncratic lowercase logo, designed by Zekkereya El-magharbel (who is also an “avant-garde trombonist,” Mr. Tatusian said).
“We wanted something really funky and unusual” rather than the elegant cursive of Gourmet’s last logo, Mr. Tatusian said, suggesting it might stand apart from the rest of the food media’s “dead-inside visual identities.”
Jessica Testa covers nontraditional and emerging media for The Times.
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