Save Me the Plums - Ruth Reichl Page 0,3

by an expat surrounded by servants and living in regal splendor. Instead, I temporized. “It’s a big country, and the food varies enormously from region to region.”

The editor remained unmoved. “Thank you for taking the time to visit,” she said.

I had been dismissed. Utterly crushed, I left the office.

Other magazines proved more enthusiastic, and I sold enough stories to be able to spend a month in Thailand pursuing unfamiliar flavors in the far corners of the country. I wished the articles were for Gourmet, but now when I picked up the magazine I saw that the adventurous spirit that had thrilled me as a child was gone. We had grown apart. I belonged to the rock-and-roll generation, thrilled by the changes in the American way of eating. Gourmet was a stately grande dame, looking admiringly across the ocean and wistfully back to the past.

The recipes were still reliable, but the tone had changed. Instead of stories about men rowing out for midnight lobster raids, there were prissy pieces about pricey restaurants and fancy resorts. I moved on to younger magazines, and although I continued to follow a few favorite writers (Laurie Colwin, Madhur Jaffrey, Joseph Wechsberg), for the next twenty-five years I rarely gave the magazine a thought.

THE PHONE WAS RINGING AS I fumbled for my keys, arms filled with mistletoe and fir. I dropped the branches on the floor, pushed the door open, dashed into the apartment, and sprinted down the hall.

“Is this the restaurant critic of The New York Times?” The voice on the other end of the line had a British accent. “I am James Truman.”

“Yes?” The name meant nothing to me.

“Editorial director of Condé Nast? I’d like to talk to you about Gourmet.”

“Gourmet?”

“I am hoping,” he went on, “that you will be willing to meet me for tea at the Algonquin. I’d ask you to the office, but we don’t want the press to know we’ve been talking.”

“The press?” What could that possibly mean?

“But he didn’t give me a clue,” I complained to my husband later. “All he would say was that he wants to talk. What do you think it’s about?”

“They’re probably looking for a new restaurant critic,” Michael said reasonably.

It was the obvious answer. “I wouldn’t write for them now,” I said. “They’re way too stuffy. So what’s the point?” Even after two decades, just thinking about the half hour I’d spent in Gourmet’s office could make me wince. “I think I’ll cancel the meeting.”

“Go,” said Michael. “You should find out what he wants. You may not be curious, but I certainly am.”

Here’s what I knew about Condé Nast before I sat down with James Truman: very little. I was aware that the company was owned by a strange and mercurial billionaire named Si Newhouse, who had recently sold Random House to Bertelsmann, a German media company—but I knew that only because they’d just published my first memoir. I knew that Condé Nast stood for luxury, class, and fashion and owned a lot of high-end magazines, but I was so oblivious I hadn’t even known they’d bought Gourmet. (Given that I’d been a food critic for twenty years, that undoubtedly says a lot about me.) Two days later, when I walked into the restaurant of the Algonquin Hotel (famous for being the scene of Dorothy Parker’s Round Table), I inhaled the scent of roasted beef, hothouse flowers, and nostalgia and wondered what I was doing there.

I followed the hostess through the dark, stubbornly old-fashioned room toward a pudgy, well-dressed gentleman seated alone at a large table. He, of course, would be my date. But the hostess kept walking, leading me to another table, where a scrap of a man rose to greet me.

Surprised, I took in the waiflike James Truman, who looked far too young to be editorial director of the vast Condé Nast empire. Could this man really be in charge of Vogue? His hair needed cutting and his rumpled clothes looked like he’d slept in them; whatever nervousness I’d had vanished.

I sat down to a table set for tea and Truman poured. “What do you think of Gourmet?”

Anticipating standard introductory small talk, I was caught off guard. And so I simply told the truth. “I went to the library yesterday to look through the last few issues, and…” I groped for a kind way to say this.

“And?”

“I’m sorry, but they put me to sleep. They’re so old-fashioned; you’d never know this was 1998.”

He seemed to be nodding agreement, so