Saturday, March 21, 2015

Saveur magazine's demise -- I'm done

I've subscribed to Saveur since 2001.  Its articles always blended traditional regional culture with classic foods, wines, and recipes.

A couple of years ago, however, it began to change, for the worse, going more toward the Bon Appetit model of articles based on "new" recipes created by riffing on standard recipes and adding random or ironic twists or ingredients to it.

Now that transformation to complete irrelevance is complete.  The last three issues have completely sucked.  No culture articles worth mentioning.  Whole articles on nouvelle cuisine-like shit made up by ironically-bearded millennial chefs who are too young to even know that nouvelle cuisine sucked the first time around in the late 70s and early 80s.  When this subscription runs out, I'm done.  If I want random recipes, I'll just hit the Internet.

UPDATE:  I'm going to keep track of how many issues it's been since the last half-way decent issue (Issue 168).  Issues 169, 170, 171, 172, and 173 all sucked.  Each time a new sucky issue comes out, I'll do a quick blog about it (until my subscription runs out -- after that, I'll probably not need to vent anymore).

3 comments:

Angelo said...

True. But last issue had some interesting gnocchi recipes

Tom Casagrande said...

I'm not saying every recipe sucks. Even crappy cooking mags occasionally have some decent recipes. But I haven't subscribed all these years to receive a random collection of new-fangled recipes accompanied by fluff text each month. Where are the articles on regional culture?

Angelo said...

I was most disappointed with the cancelation of la cucina italia