kstoeffel@observer.com :: @kstoeffel

Last year around this time, Ms. Reichl gave a few interviews to talk about the end of Gourmet. She spoke with Deborah Solomon from The New York Times Magazine:

How did you learn that your job no longer exists? Who told you?
Si.

Meaning S. I. Newhouse, who owns Condé Nast Publications. In an e-mail message or in person?
It was not an e-mail.

Sounds like phone.
It was a conversation. I wouldn't in a million years have imagined this.

Ms. Reichl also spoke with The Observer at a party to celebrate Ms. Reichl's television show, Adventures with Ruth, 10 days after the Gourmet was shuttered. Ms. Reichl lamented the end of the magazine and talked about the "rarefied world" of Condé Nast that always seemed foreign to her ("It’s a life that is probably coming to an end,” she said).

She also forecasted the Gourmet Live iPad app. “I do think that there is going to be something that will be very exciting and that will incorporate video, instant shopping,” Ms. Reichl told The Observer. “I think that the rich experience that is in magazines will likely move to another platform. It won’t be online. It will be what magazines are now, tools for living and inspirational and intellectually rich. I think magazines in that sense won’t be going away.”

Minus a hiccup or two, that is pretty close to what happened with the relaunch of Gourmet on the iPad. Upon hearing about the plans in June Ms. Reichl tweeted "they're reviving the brand, not the magazine. Pity."

Ms. Reichl has most recently re-emerged as an editor-at-large for Random House. She will be making deals for food-related books and thinking about the digital future of food writing.

Ms. Smith stared down at a tri-fold menu printed on glossy paper. On the cover, a heavily mascaraed model with black nail polish was biting into a piece of roasted lamb skewered on a rosemary sprig. "I know I'm having the lobster roll and a tomato soup," she told The Observer.

"I don't remember when I stopped counting how many ad pages came out of the Condé Nast building," Ms. Smith said. "But when the luxury market went away you did have to take a deep breath and say, 'O.K., what do I do?'"

Ms. Smith left her position as chief brand officer at Elle to take over the business side of Bon Appétit and Gourmet four months ago. At the time Condé Nast was starting to think about other ways to make money besides print advertising. Brand licensing, which for years seemed too down-market, was now on the table.

Condé Nast publicists arrived with lobster rolls on faux bamboo plates and tomato soup in white to-go cups. The soup was sponsored by Visa Signature, according to bold-faced type on the menu and conceived by Bon Appétit executive chef Cat Cora. Ms. Cora frequently appears on the Food Network show Iron Chef America.

"I wasn't here three months ago. I wasn't here when Si had very clear ideas of what he was doing," Ms. Smith said, swallowing a piece of lobster meat. "But the world changed."

Bon Appétit has sponsored "pop-up cafés" before, but never for Fashion Week, and never with so many big-name chefs. Ms. Smith asked the likes of Mario Batali, Emeril Lagase, Michael Laiskonis and Daniel Boulud to contribute items to the menu. She got designers from the fashion world to work with the chefs and do publicity for the café.

John Delucie, the chef behind The Lion, had just finished lunch across the room and came over to say goodbye to Ms. Smith before heading out.

"Nice to see you! I'll see you soon," Mr. Delucie said.

"Absolutely. You'll see me for sure," Ms. Smith replied with a beaming smile.

Is this the man who made the lobster rolls, The Observer wondered? Ms. Smith leaned in. "No," she said quietly. They were from Laurent Toroundel's BLT Market. "Nor is it his soup, so I hope he didn't look over," she said.

While Condé Nast was turning its nose up at licensing, Ms. Smith was cutting deals with Harvey Weinstein to put Elle on television in Project Runway and thinking of other ways to make money on the magazine's brand. Then Elle started to beat Vogue in ad pages, too. "That's the thing about magazine publishing," she said. "When you start to make money, you make a lot of money." Ms. Smith added more than 1,500 ad pages to Elle in six years.

But why leave Elle?

"It was an opportunity," she said. "There was no Condé Nast food group. It was yet to be born. There was no Gourmet. What will it be? What can Bon Appétit be in a post-Gourmet world? Can I get Bon Appétit onto television? Is there a licensing opportunity? If so, what would that look like. All of the things that I had done at Elle."

Shortly after Elle took first place away from Vogue, Ms. Smith got a call from Condé Nast fashion publishing director Tom Florio "He and I were not friends then," she said. "We were enemies. As I said to someone, I'd much rather work with him than compete with him." Mr. Florio asked her if she could do the same thing for food that she did for fashion.

"Even my arrival" she said, was a sign of changes at Condé. "They would never hire me. Never ever ever ever. I'm a brand builder! I've always been a brand builder."

And there's a lot of building to do in the food group at Condé Nast. There has never been an business person in charge of both Gourmet and Bon Appétit.

Bon Appétit and Gourmet were always in competition. "They fought like feuding families, like Romeo and Juliet," she said. "They wanted each other dead!"

Last fall the company announced that it was closing Gourmet and then, this spring, Condé Nast CEO Chuck Townsend unveiled the resurrection of Ruth Reichl's brand as an iPad app, Gourmet Live.

"My coming and, of course, Gourmet closing as a magazine was a moment in time which said 'there's no more fighting. We're a group,'" Ms. Smith said. "The editor of Bon Appétit is the editor of Bon Appétit and the editors of Gourmet Live now are the editors of Gourmet Live — producers," she corrected herself. "Dare I call them editors. But the business side, me, I'm all things. I'm all things food."

Ms. Smith's hair — short, blonde, with bangs — draws comparisons to Anna Wintour, though it's a few shades darker. Ms. Smith, 61, dressed in a navy blue V-neck sweater over a plain white T-shirt for lunch. She wore her wristwatch on top of her sleeve for most of the meal, but when she was done with her lobster roll and soup, she slipped the watch beneath her sweater and pulled her cuffs down over her hands. She pulled a tube from her purse and casually applied a fresh layer of makeup to her lips.

Ms. Smith was always intimidated by Condé Nast. She's shy, she said. In more than 25 years in the magazine business, she never set foot in Four Times Square until this year. "It's always been very intimidating to me," she said. "Time Inc. didn't intimidate me. Forbes didn't intimidate me. Hachette didn't intimidate me. Condé Nast intimidated me," she said.

"They're so focused on producing the highest quality that they will stop at nothing. There's something very religious about it I guess," she said. "You feel in awe of the place, no matter what."

At Hachette, Ms. Smith used to sell advertising against Condé's smug superiority. "When I was at Elle I used to go 'Oh, Elle, we're the club you can get into. Everyone's welcome at Elle," she said. "What you realize is, no, Condé Nast is the club you can get into. Anyone can read Vogue. Anyone can be part of that world."

"There's a mystique. Whether it's the mystique of Anna or Graydon or Bon Appétit. No one would want that to go away, would they? I don't want that to go away," she said. "But nonetheless even Anna talks about the democratizing of Vogue and fashion. Who would have thought that Vera Wang would be in Kohl's five years ago?"

Ms. Smith said the company is worried much less about taking risks with its brands or getting creative on the business side. There is, after all, money to be made. "At Condé Nast that's very new," she added. "Imagine Condé Nast doing Gourmet Live. Imagine Condé Nast announcing Gourmet Live before they built it. I mean, just totally amazing."

Ms. Smith was thinking big-picture. "I mean the big game-change would be to own a network," she said. "Where's the Bon Appétit network?"

A marketing executive from Belvedere stopped at Ms. Smith's table to thank her for lunch. She invited him to a City Ballet Gala in the fall. She sits on the ballet's board.

"I'd love to come," he said. "I used to always, always, always go to the opera, but I just haven't the last couple of years because I sort of needed a break, and I thought 'why don't I go to the ballet?'"

"It's going to be great. It's an amazing, amazing evening," Ms. Smith said.

"I'd love to come," he said. " And, Carol, thank you for lunch."

Ms. Smith seemed to enjoy the perks of owning a restaurant, at least temporarily.

"All I want is my own bar — one bar," Ms. Smith said, turning back to The Observer. "We're working on a TV show about building a bar. I am like 'this could be mine!'"

"I just think owning a bar would be the coolest thing," she continued.

Ms. Smith would also like to be a ballerina. "In another life I wanted to be a ballerina. I wanted to give birth to a ballerina," she said. Her eyes darted around the room.

"Ballet needs to reinvent itself," she said. "Back when I was coming of age, ballet — they were celebrities! Darci Kistler was in ads for scotch."

zturner@observer.com / @zekeft

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 using a variety of marketing approaches and prices to stimulate more volume for the second issue. We’ll see how it goes and we’ll learn from there,” Condé Nast group president Bob Sauerberg told PaidContent earlier this week after the company announced its plans to revive Gourmet as an iPad app.

The Sports Illustrated app departs from Wired by not bundling the videos included with the issue. That means you have to be connected to the internet when you watch the app's videos, but it also means the issue doesn't take an eternity to download.

The Sports Illustrated app has advertisements from seven companies. Sports Illustrated editor Terry McDonell told The Times that a recent sales call in Chicago to pitch the app was the "best ad sales call that I’ve ever been on."

Sports Illustrated released a demo of the application at the end of last year.

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 won't launch until the fall, but you can take a look at a demo at live.gourmet.com.

The application will rely mostly on the archives of the Gourmet brand. In a demo shown to reporters this morning, we found the legendary "Consider the Lobster" story by David Foster Wallace, and a video of a recipe with John Doc Willoughby, the former executive editor. There's a decades-worth of content, but we wonder if it'll feel — pardon the expression — a little stale after a while.

Ruth Reichl, the editor of Gourmet from 1999 to 2009, was not at the press conference. At the briefing, her name wasn't uttered once. On her twitter this morning, Ms. Reichl wrote, "they're reviving the brand, not the magazine. Pity."

It's a logical experiment for Conde Nast. If they're going to to try to create a digital enterprise, why not make it (1) food-related, where, according to Conde Nast, 60 million uniques a month are trawling the web in search of food content and (2) use a brand name that's so iconic?

"Ca-ching! Thank you very much, if you will," said Conde Nast CEO Chuck Townsend, at one point in today's press conference describing the success of Wired's app for the iPad.

Mr. Townsend was sporting a blue blazer, a nice buttondown and a healthy tan (Bob Sauerberg, the Conde Nast group president who also spoke, wore a nearly identical outfit).

Mr. Townsend obviously hopes there will be a similar success with this app. He said this is a technology and revenue play for the company, and said specifically it's not a magazine or a digitized version of the magazine.

You'll be able to download the app for free, but then you'll be paying for things along the way (everyone was particularly excited about virtual currency). You can check out recipes, videos, stories and you'll also be able to take a look at a map and Gourmet reviews of a particular restaurant along the way.

But as Mr. Townsend emphasized — and which was reiterated by their partners at Activate, a technology consulting company — this is all about making a web business, even if it is creating a new one by using all the leftovers.

Ca-ching?

The launch comes after Carol Smith was brought on in April from Elle as a vice president and publishing director to plot the post-Gourmet future of Condé's epicurean group. Content from and/or sponsored by Bon Appetit, Gourmet and epicurious.com will appear in the magazine.

As a product for advertisers, Dash seems like a great idea, but as a keeper of Gourmet's flame, it is surprisingly down-market.

Dash will go after a recent surge in advertising from packaged food companies (e.g. Heinz, Hershey, Kraft and Smucker), which are spending as much as 81.2 percent more on advertising since the last year, according to The Times. The magazine will also bring Condé Nast content to fresh audiences, reaching 45 million women who read daily newspapers, 81 percent of whom do not read other food magazines, according to a release.

Ruth Reichl toasted news of the launch this morning with "Crisply fried blood sausage, fragile orange-dusted octopus, huge juicy shrimp, spicy peppers and one awesome rib eye."

“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 Ruth Reichl, it’s edited in New York. Bon Ap is in L.A.—it’s never really reflected the Condé Nast culture.”

Well, six months after Si Newhouse ignored that advice and chose Bon Ap and closed Gourmet, The Times is questioning that decision.

Bon Appetit, faced with the intimidating task of becoming the Condé Nast food book, set the bar pretty low for itself. The magazine only promised advertisers a 200,000 bump in circulation, even though Gourmet had five times as many subscriptions, all of which were transferred automatically to Bon Appetit following the close.

Bon Appetit's ad pages haven't picked up all of Gourmet's business either, taking on only five additional pages of advertising in the first quarter. Gourmet had over 106 ad pages in its last quarter.

Where did 101 ad pages go? Carol Smith, vice president and publishing director for Bon Appetit, said that the transition has been "healthy" and she will be announcing plans for the Gourmet brand soon. But that's a promise we've been hearing from Conde Nast for six months now.

Meanwhile "Lower-end food magazines" are thriving, according to The Times.

While their ad pages are generally up, their bigger boasting rights are on the circulation side. Food Network Magazine’s first official issue (after two test issues) was just a year ago, in June-July 2009, when the magazine’s guaranteed circulation was 400,000. The magazine, owned by Hearst, has since raised it twice, and will soon increase it to 1.25 million, or the combined guaranteed circulation of Saveur and Food & Wine.

Every Day With Rachael Ray’s circulation is 1.79 million, Taste of Home, 3.2 million, and Cooking Light, 1.78 million, the magazines said in their most recent audit bureau filings, suggesting the wide appeal of these publications.

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 obsessed over eggs. She is turning her post-Condé tale into a book, which is due out in May. Meanwhile, Brandon Holley, who lost her editor in chief job when Jane folded three years ago, has landed at Yahoo, and riffed to The Times earlier this month about how the no-frills lifestyle on the Web isn’t much like life at 4 Times Square.   

So! We wondered how other victims of Mr. Newhouse’s golden machete were adapting to life after Condé. “It was definitely a tough experience,” said Pilar Guzman—the popular editor of the mom magazine Cookie, which folded in October—from her place in Park Slope. “I was the rookie who got to do it for five solid years without interruption. It was definitely rough having the rug pulled from under you.”

Ms. Guzman said she’s been concentrating her efforts on two pursuits: wrapping up a cookbook for Cookie and creating a Web site.

The Web site will be called momfilter.com, which she described as a lifestyle site for the modern mom. She’s looking for funding now, and is hoping for a launch date in the fall. She’s working on the site with Yolanda Edwards, another former Cookie editor.

She said she’s excited about the prospect of turning herself over to the Web, and said Cookie could have survived if Condé had invested significantly in the magazine’s Web site. “We had sort of a limited capability of what we could do online, as I’m sure you’re well aware,” she said.

And how has she taken to the transition from 4 Times Square to life at home in Park Slope? “I wasn’t Anna or Graydon, I rode the subway every day!” she said. “If you have your feet on the ground, then that fall from grace is not a fall from grace. It’s like a loss of any job.”

Deborah Needleman, the editor of Domino, which folded in January 2009, said she’s cooking up a Web site of her own with Ken Lerer, the chairman of the Huffington Post.
“It’s a commerce site—with a Domino-like sensibility—that makes it easy and pleasurable to decorate and shop for a home,” she wrote in an email.

(With all this talk about the Web, it’s also worth noting that Dana Goodyear, a writer for The New Yorker, is starting a Web venture with Jacob Lewis, the former managing editor of Portfolio.)

Ms. Needleman said she’s working on an illustrated decorating book with the artist Virginia Johnson for the Crown imprint Clarkson Potter, and she’s done some consulting work for media clients whom she’d rather not name (we’ve heard that she’s been doing some work helping out The Wall Street Journal). Her name has also been floated—by WWD—as a potential nominee to replace Stefano Tonchi as the editor of The Times’ T Magazine.

Joanne Lipman, the editor of Portfolio, lost her magazine nearly a year ago. And what has she been up to?

Ms. Lipman hasn’t landed on her feet yet, nor did she let on about any plans for a Web venture, but she’s made a few appearances on CNN’s Your Money and has written a pair of editorials for The Times, including one about women and the workplace. (The piece wasn’t much of a hit with some bloggers; Jezebel described it “as so ham-handed and contradictory, it read like a tutorial on How Not to Talk About Sexism.”)

Ms. Lipman emailed to say she’s turned down a few jobs and has taken to projects she’s found “interesting,” such as “advising one of the BusinessWeek bidders” and “advising news organizations on business coverage.” She wouldn’t elaborate.  

Ruth Reichl, who lost Gourmet last October, declined to comment for this story, but has been an active Twitterer, with daily food-and-drink-related updates!

During Tuesday’s monsoon, she tweeted, “Rain biblical. Scarlet glow of kimichi eggs. Potent tea, very black.”

(What’s with all this talk of eggs with these ex-Condé editors?)

Though PBS wants her to continue her show Gourmet’s Adventures With Ruth, there’s still no word on whether that’s actually coming back for a second season.

When we chatted with Ms. Reichl shortly after Gourmet folded, she said she had plans for a memoir about her years at Condé. “It’s a very rarefied world,” she said. “It was a world that most people—I had no idea that this particular world existed. I sort of think of it as ‘Ruthie in Wonderland.’ People are fascinated by the world. It’s a life that is probably coming to an end.”

Though Ms. Browning’s piece was light on the Condé Nast gossip, perhaps Ms. Reichl can fill the gap!

jkoblin@observer.com

"Foggy fall afternoon," Reichl wrote. "Cup of lemon tea. Outside the window, a deer is munching on the lawn. About to start the saturday puzzle. Happy."

Also: Ms. Reichl has temporarily set aside her anticipated Gourmet memoir in favor of another project.

In new news, Page Six reports that "about a dozen" former Gourmet editors will be decamping to AOL to start a food site, which Cheryl Brown will edit.

"I got on the horn right away when I heard the magazine was closing," library director Marvin Taylor told the paper. "It's fascinating because you can see the various trends that Gourmet covered. . . . There are six or eight shelves of Cajun books. The same was true for Mediterranean books. There's a very large Asian selection."

The books arrive at the library later this week, and will be available to NYU-affiliated people as well as to "private scholars" who make prior appointments.