The new ‘Gourmet’ logo is an acquired taste 

A self-described “rat pack” of five “food-loving journalists” just bought the trademark to the defunct food magazine Gourmet, updated it for the modern reader, and brought it back as an online newsletter—all without consulting the magazine’s former publisher, Condé Nast. And if you didn’t know that already, you might’ve been able to guess it from the publication’s new wordmark.

The logo looks nothing like what you’d expect from the magazine that shuttered in 2009. Instead of a crisp, delicate script, this wordmark is unapologetically blocky, chunky, and weird. It’s more reminiscent of forgotten sheet pan drippings: certainly not pretty too look at, but more delicious than you’d expect. Introducing the modern Gourmet: It’s pithy, recipe-obsessed, and designed for the home chef who’s sick of brightly lit photos of one-pan dinners.

A new, Substack-era food mag with no interest in being a crowd-pleaser

The idea to bring back the magazine began when former Los Angeles Times writer and Gourmet cofounder Sam Dean noticed something strange. “He called me and was like, ‘Dude, I think I just figured something out,'” says graphic designer Alex Tatusian, another of the brand’s cofounders. “‘I’m on the U.S. Trademark Office site, and I’m pretty sure that Condé forgot to renew the trademark for Gourmet.’” Tatusian and Dean found three other collaborators, formed an LLC, and bought the trademark for a few thousand dollars. 

The creatives behind Gourmet follow in the footsteps of several other journalists and writers who have recently departed the endlessly beleaguered realm of traditional media in favor of their own self-published ventures. These include worker-owned shops like Hell Gate, Defector, and 404 Media, as well as food-based titles like Vittles and Best Food Blog, and even individual food creators like Molly Baz and Claire Saffitz. 

In the Gourmet founders’ opening salvo to readers, they propose that legacy brands “largely botched” the transition from print to digital, and diluted their missions in the process.

“I think what I’ve seen in food media are these dual forces: The recipes have become more relatable or lowest common denominator, but it’s being put in these very shiny packages,” says cofounder Nozlee Samadzadeh.

So in lieu of clicky “10 minute” recipes with flash photography, Gourmet’s founders want to make work for an audience that really, really enjoys food: long, reported features on Gavin Newsom’s Napa wine empire; odes to baked rice pudding; and manifestos for people who are sick of easy dinners. (And it won’t appeal to everyone.)

Tatusian calls today’s Gourmet, which is available on the open source platform Ghost with a $7 monthly subscription, a “transmogrified” version of the original. Given its limited resources, it’s embracing an unapologetically craft-focused, funky, punk-rock approach designed for the modern newsletter resurgence. In short, it’s a wholesale rejection of the highly produced, SEO-optimized content that’s come to dominate the modern food media space.

Gourmet’s ‘shit-stirring energy’ takes aim at expected design taste

Looking through Gourmet’s new site feels a bit like being bombarded with a series of ingredients that don’t entirely go together. And for the publication’s general premise, that makes an odd kind of sense: It’s a group of young people, reviving a magazine that was once mainly for the wealthy elite, in an accessible format and on a shoestring budget. 

“You look at old Gourmet and there’s black letter Gothic text, and script, and cursive, and, God, they want you to be rich, you know what I mean?” Tatusian says. “It has such a classist energy. I think there’s something about that that we both want to celebrate, because it is beautiful and it is the history of this publication going way back, but we also need to lightly lampoon. With the whole crew, there’s a bit of a shit-stirring energy.”

That spirit is embodied by the new Gourmet logo, which is perhaps the furthest image one could image from the publication’s buttoned-up, cursive font. The design was created by trombonist Zekkereya El-magharbel, who Tatusian discovered after noticing his charmingly off-kilter posters for jazz events in L.A.

Each letterform looks almost like it was cut haphazardly from a piece of cardstock, with unexpected bumps, sharp angles, and wonky curves throughout. The process, Tatusian says, was a mix of El-magharbel responding to the prompt and picking up on “the energy of the magazine that we were going for—making something punk and unusual.”

The publication’s illustration style, which mimics 19th century motifs, also pokes some lighthearted fun at what Tatusian calls the “hilarious formality” of older cooking and food magazines. In one key image at the top of the page, a real vintage line drawing is paired with a slapdash digital rendering of a red soda can. And, as a cheeky “so what?” to the broader food media landscape, the entire Gourmet site is rendered in what would traditionally be considered an off-putting brown.

“It’s a little bit of a visual joke, in that people in food media are often telling you to put color in a dish when you’re styling something or in a photoshoot or on the page, because brown food is unappetizing, it’s disgusting, blah, blah, blah,” Tatusian says. “Actually, it’s not! We eat so much good brown and beige food.”

Samadzadeh and Tatusian say they plan on running some image-centric stories in the future, but they don’t have a specific aesthetic vision in mind for the publication’s photography—instead, they’d rather let contributors bring their own styles to the work. For now, they’re more focused on creating the kind of food content that they’d like to read.

“We do want them to be beautiful,” Tatusian says. “It’s not that we want them to be disgusting, but I also think that we’re also interested in how people spend time together around food, and not as much about making an Instagramable product out of all the art that we produce.”

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