Gourmet’s New Soul

Ruth Reichl’s much-awaited “new” Gourmet magazine won’t debut until September, but the August edition on the newsstands contains at least one portent of things to come. For what might be the first time in her nearly 30 years at the magazine, West Coast restaurant critic Caroline Bates has written a negative review.

The unlucky first? Bouchon, the lower-priced spinoff of Thomas Keller’s universally acclaimed The French Laundry in the Napa Valley. In a review of wine country restaurants, after praising Ken Frank’s La Toque, The Restaurant at Meadowood and Catahoula, she confesses to finding Bouchon underwhelming.

“I had high hopes,” she writes. “But I think it really misses the mark. It is an urban American’s idea of a French bistro, all style and no soul.”

On the next page, she similarly disses Brava Terrace chef Fred Halpert’s new effort, Livefire (“Wildly uneven kitchen and spotty service . . . wood smoke permeates almost everything. . . .”)

In other Gourmet news, Reichl, the former food editor at the Los Angeles Times, has already drawn some flack--or more accurately, her overattentive ad staff has. Apparently inspired by the two-page farewell advertisement she drew in the New York Times from local chefs, the New York Observer reports that the magazine’s ad sellers have been approaching restaurants about sponsoring similar ads in her debut issue--at $1,000 a pop.

“The ad amounts to a shakedown from a publication that both reviews and promotes dining establishments,” it quotes an unnamed “restaurant source” as saying.