Reichl brings new voices to \'Gourmet\'

NEW YORK — Ruth Reichl is striding briskly through the corridors of Gourmet, looking very much the role she has just assumed: editor of one of America\'s most venerable magazines.Dressed in a smart black suit, she stops by the magazine\'s bustling test kitchens, chatting with the staff. It\'s clear that she\'s reached one of the top positions in food writing after more than two decades of work as a chef, editor, restaurant critic and best-selling author.Yet over lunch, she\'s your pal. At a Manhattan restaurant run by celebrity chef Larry Forgione, she slides her plate closer to make sharing bites easier."Get a belly," she said, picking through her plate of fried clams to find a fine, plump belly to offer her dining companion. "It\'s the best part."Getting people together over food is what Reichl is all about. "Even though I\'ve spent my life in the food industry, I\'ll take a mediocre meal with great company over a great meal with boring company any day," she said.It\'s also a big part of the changes she\'s making at Gourmet magazine, which has been showing a few of its 58 years as competitors like Saveur, Cooking Light and Food and Wine liven up the sometimes stodgy field of food writing.The first issue under Reichl\'s guidance, due out on newsstands Tuesday, will feature several changes that showcase the philosophy of its new editor. There also will be new uses for the magazine\'s sterling assets, such as its finely tuned test kitchen.Saying she wants to put "more of a voice in the magazine," Reichl is inviting well-known writers to go on adventurous trips and write about them. In the September issue, novelist Pat Conroy goes on a honeymoon in Italy and psychedelic monologue artist Spalding Gray takes a family trip to Disney World.There\'s also an excerpt from the new Julia Child cookbook, a regular "Kitchen Notebook" feature with first-hand look at the work done there, and a back page column where writers get to sound off on topics they feel strongly about. In the first one, novelist Ann Patchett complains about the frustrations of cooking for finicky people.Other changes include making recipes more conversational and spicing up photos with more people and fancier presentations. Reichl is also throwing out a relic of the past, editing copy on paper, although in some ways that system allowed its own kind of personal touch. One manuscript she held up had a food stain on it, which someone had circled with a pen and labeled as "created in the kitchens of Gourmet magazine."This is not the first time Reichl has stepped in to jazz up an established publication. While still working happily as food editor of the Los Angeles Times, she was reluctant to accept an offer from the New York Times to be their restaurant critic, saying she found the tone of their criticism "Olympian.""You really can\'t have a right or wrong. You have to have a voice," Reichl said. One of the reasons she left the field of art history, in which she has a masters\' degree, was "the judgment thing," she said.After being assured by senior editors that she would have free rein to bring her own style to the reviews, she accepted and returned to her hometown. For the following six years she brought a personal and frank tone as well as eclectic tastes to the food pages of the New York Times, earning her a wide following among diners.Last year she gained a national reputation with her best-selling memoir, Tender at the Bone, which recounted her years as a chef in Berkeley, Calif., and her earliest discoveries of fine food as a child, many of which came thanks to live-in maids and travel to France and Canada. Her own mother\'s dreadful fare inspired a chapter titled "The Queen of Mold."In addition to editing Gourmet, which is part of the Conde Nast magazine family, Reichl is working on a second volume of her memoirs and writing the introduction for a new edition of writings by M.F.K. Fisher, one of the most renowned food writers.As a reviewer, Reichl brought a kind of democracy to restaurant criticism with a zero tolerance for attitude. In an incident now legendary on New York\'s culinary scene, she stripped one of the four stars from Le Cirque after receiving condescending treatment and poor food when the staff did not recognize her.She wrote a two-part review, one as the "Unknown Diner," one as a "Most Favored Patron," from another occasion when the staff spotted her and gave her kid-glove treatment.Colman Andrews, who worked with Reichl at the Los Angeles Times, says she "brought a personal side to her writing that some people didn\'t like, such as bringing along her husband, whom she described as \'The Reluctant Gourmet.\' But they were very effective devices for humanizing restaurant criticism, which can so easily be lists of menu items with adjectives thrown in."Andrews, while an admirer and friend of Reichl\'s, also edits a rival magazine. In the five years since Andrews co-founded Saveur, it has won high praise among culinary professionals for its rich writing about food history, ingredients and cooking.But that doesn\'t mean he\'s not just as excited as other readers of Gourmet to see what kind of changes Reichl brings. "I\'m sure she\'ll do something very good, and I hope that it\'s so good that we have to get worried and have to do better ourselves," Andrews said.David Rosengarten, host of three shows on the Food Network, says he "couldn\'t be more excited" about seeing the new Gourmet. "One of the great things Ruth brought to her work at the New York Times was a strong literary sensibility, which greatly bolstered the level of restaurant criticism."For now, Reichl is still adjusting to the pace of life at a big corporate office, which means long hours — but also not dining out every night to survey restaurants, and that means more time to spend with her husband and 10-year-old son. In fact, one recent evening, Reichl was looking forward to going out to dinner, her first meal out in more than three weeks."It must be the longest stretch I\'ve done without going out to dinner in 23 years," she said. "I miss my friends."