dullsville 100

I am disgruntled. Saveur magazine has finally jumped the shark in a way that I can’t ignore or explain away, and it feels a lot like it did when they bulldozed my favorite 24-hour Korean restaurant in Las Vegas: something that used to be lots of fun is just gone, replaced by some corporate snooze.
The Saveur 100 issue just arrived, and usually I jump on it with glee and scan through the list to see which exciting treasures I already knew about, and what new things I might learn. This one I read through and shrugged. This one is the “Home Cook Edition,” which is apparently code for “pandering to boring wanna-be foodies who can’t find their ass with both hands but love to shop at Sur La Table.” BLARGH.
5 must-have sugars, 6 cooking oils, how to make your own mustard, fancy condiments and salts. Yawn. The Saveur 100 should not be about what you should buy to feel like a “real home cook” — it should be about bizarre treasures found, hidden gems celebrated, and forgotten simplicities rediscovered. I am about a third of the way through the magazine, I’m already annoyed, and I may not even bother reading the rest of it. And this is on top of the appallingly pedestrian graphic redesign (oh how I miss those white covers framing one jewel of a photo), and the alarming tendency toward mass-market, lowest-common-denominator content both in the covers and the articles (a turkey on the cover for November? 14 amazing pastas? give me a break — if I want that stuff, I’ll buy Food & Wine or Good Housekeeping, and sometimes I do). I never thought the day would come, but I’m actually entertaining the idea of letting the subscription lapse.
Saveur of old, I miss you.