Founding and early years Gourmet was founded by Earle MacAusland who went on to serve as publisher and editor in chief for nearly forty years. Its main competitor at the time was
American Cookery, formerly the Boston Cooking School Magazine, also known as the “Boston Cooking-school Magazine Of Culinary Science And Domestic Economics”, which had been published since 1896. In 1965, the magazine established its own test kitchen.
Subsequent years MacAusland died in 1980. Montant was succeeded by Gail Zweigenthal, who had been working at the magazine since 1965. In January 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. (Reichl had joined the
Times in 1993; previously, she had been the restaurant critic for
The Los Angeles Times.)
Gourmet then had a circulation of about 880,000. Reichl was seen to raise the ambition level of
Gourmet, introducing stories on such subjects as the plight of migrant tomato pickers in Florida, not-so-sustainably farm-raised salmon, and the ethical questions generated by boiling lobsters alive (in David Foster Wallace's now widely read piece "Consider the Lobster"). The magazine went on to win a number of National Magazine and James Beard Awards, and, with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt publishers, brought out
The Gourmet Cookbook in 2004. The book featured 1,200 recipes published in the magazine over the previous 60 years. (In 2002, the
Modern Library published
Endless Feasts: Sixty Years Of Writing From Gourmet.) The magazine poured extensive resources into developing and testing recipes, with 12 test-kitchen chefs and an in-house photographer. Food costs alone ran to over $100,000 a year. The English journalist and food writer
Jay Rayner noted that "Working for
Gourmet was like flying the Atlantic first class. It ruined you for other food magazines. It wasn't just the pay, which could be multiple dollars per word. It was also the awe inspiring heft of the operation: the way food photography events were organised like they were Hollywood movie shoots, complete with casting calls and on-site catering; the attentions of the many editors; the pursuit by dreaded fact checkers." In January 2008,
Gourmet launched its own website. (Its content had previously been funneled into
Epicurious.) The site included stories, reviews, videos, recipes, and archival material dating to the magazine's launch in 1941. Contributors included
John T. Edge,
Michael Pollan,
Eric Ripert,
Heston Blumenthal, and
Colman Andrews. Reichl had been lobbying Condé Nast for a standalone
Gourmet site since 1999. (To the chagrin of the magazine's staff,
Gourmets recipes would continue to appear on the Epicurious site.) Townsend acknowledged the difficulties for magazines in the wake of the economic meltdown of 2008. The decision to close the magazine was unexpected; the chef and restaurateur
Alice Waters is said to have nearly cried when she heard the news of
Gourmets demise. The cookbook included over 1,000 recipes for everything from vegetable dishes to
cocktails. In September 2010, Condé Nast revived the brand as an app, but stopped updating it two years later. In 2019, Reichl published
Save Me the Plums, a memoir of her time at
Gourmet.
Trademark lapse and relaunch In 2021, the trademark registration lapsed, and in January 2026, a group of five food journalists launched a worker-owned online newsletter on
Ghost using the name. ==Editors==