323: We ❤️ Saveur with Dorothy Kalins

0:00This episode is brought to you by Resi and American Express. Resi is a digital platform that connects restaurants to restaurant lovers by elevating dining experiences, providing original industry content, and helping to fill some of the country's most exciting dining rooms. Because restaurants have always been more than just places to eat. The amazing world of restaurants is just a few taps away in the Resi app and at resi.com. Eliza, this week is different. We're doing a themed week here on This Is Taste. I love a theme week. What's this theme? So this episode is the first of three from principals or editors or founders or I'm not I'm going to be vague because I don't want to say who each interview is with to spoil the surprise.

0:41These are the key figures in the Savoir magazine universe, past, present and future. Why Savoir? Why a whole week for Savoir? It's a great question because, you know, food media is it's not a new thing. There's been magazines around forever. We talk about gourmet almost weekly here on This Is Taste. And I feel like we could probably do this with gourmet. But Savore was not gourmet. It was founded in 1994 by Dorothy Kalins, Michael Grossman, Christopher Hirshheimer and Coleman Andrews. And it was founded on the principle that food was not just food. It wasn't just recipes. Food had story. Food had place.

1:16And this is a tenet that when I founded Taste with Anna Heasel back in 2017 and many others and continue to this day with you, Eliza, this is at really the core of our beliefs of what we do here at Taste and what many do in food media. But before Savor was launched in 94, it wasn't as clear. And so this week is a tribute in some ways, but it's also looking forward in some ways in the universe of Savor. So we're looking to the past, we're looking to the future, and it's all happening right now in the present. Yeah, that's a good way to put it. I mean, I wanted to talk about why this magazine was so important to me personally.

1:56Because for me as an editor, you know, I came into it with the James Olsland era, which, you know, started in the early 2000s roughly. You know, before that was Dorothy and Coleman were doing it, and James worked under Coleman later and would take over. But what Savore did, and through James' book work earlier, was it said that there's a documentary approach to food writing, which is something that I hold really deeply and close to me, meaning that you don't have to have a photo studio to do food media. You don't have to have a professional test kitchen to do food media, though, of course, Savore had one and has one.

2:30You only need a story at origin and you need an inquisitive writer, editor, et cetera, to kind of tell that story. And James, what he would do with Savor and what Dorothy and Coleman did before that, they would place origin at the center of their story. So, for example, Oslin did a Mexico issue, a whole issue about Mexico. And when he did that, it wasn't that wasn't a common thing. You know, maybe it was in travel magazines, but it was full of luxury hotels and and stories about white people. But what James did with that issue and many other themed issues was go to the source, take the staff there.

3:04This was time he did it with the India issue, which is quite famous and infamous in some ways, because he ripped up the issue, I believe, and restarted halfway through. He would take his staff to the country and report on it. And this was at that heart of Savor. And one real tentpole that I think many of our listeners will remember is the Savor 100. Liza, are you familiar with that at all, the Savor 100? No, tell me about it. The Savor 100 was kind of the food internet before the food internet. and it started almost at the beginning of Savor and would continue through the Prince run into the 2020s.

3:39And essentially it was a hundred things that the editors decided that they wanted to call out. And it was everything from locations like Richmond, Virginia was one I remember to like ingredients, salsa matcha, hummus, tahini, et cetera. Like things that we take for granted today as being part of our lexicon. The Savor 100 was calling these out in like a very complete issue. and also cooking techniques that perhaps weren't at the tip of our tongues back in the 90s and 2000s. And really, the Savor 100 was kind of a guide every year to all these refreshing ideas about food. Well, it sounds great.

4:13And I think as somebody that's very much caught up in the present day of food media, I'm excited to get to listen and revisit the past and also kind of think about that in regards to the future as well. I really hope you enjoy this week of Savor episodes. And here is Dorothy Kamens.

4:37We actually did a focus group. We mocked up some covers. And so the people in the focus groups were demographically correct. And it didn't bother them that they didn't know what the magazine was called or how to pronounce it. They got that it was authentic. This is Taste. I'm your host, Matt Rodbarg.

5:05So we're starting with Dorothy Kalins' first interview. Dorothy founded Savor in 1994. She was then the editor-in-chief of Metropolitan Home, and as you'll hear in this interview, decided that there needed to be a new food magazine. So she recruited some friends, and along the way, had a vision for what Savor magazine would be. And in this episode, we talk about those early days and really finding the voice of Savor. We find out how she staffed it and eventually why she left it. It's a really great first episode in this week of Savor episodes. And, you know, we couldn't start with anyone other than Dorothy Kalins.

5:39And I hope you enjoy this conversation.

5:50Dorothy Kalins, welcome to This Is Taste. Pleased to be here. Long time coming. I'm such a huge fan of your work, and we don't really know each other, but I want to know you. Well, this is a start. This is a start, and The Kitchen Whispers is your memoir that you released last year, and I've had the pleasure of reading through it, and we'll cover that in the second part of the interview. But really, I wanted to have you in. You're a co-founder of Savore. Just from the jump, how did you intend for it to be pronounced? When you were writing that word in a notepad, what did you want people to pronounce it?

6:24That's a great question. So we were a tiny little publishing company. It was run by Chris Meir. It was Meir Communications. Chris had been the head of magazines at Time, Inc. He was a publisher of Time. And one of the things that he did was to run a very demographically focused group of magazines that went to kind of high, not only moneyed people, but well-educated people who were sophisticated people who constitute a magazine audience. And so he had met a man named Daniel Bonnier, who is from the original Swedish publishing company. But he had done a magazine called Severer with an S in Paris, and it was very successful.

7:21And he, I don't know, they made a deal. And that was before I was hired as editor-in-chief of the company. OK. And before you and Coleman Andrews iterated it and created it and mood boarded it and did all that. We'll get into that. So it was a name you inherited. We didn't inherit. Chris said, do you think we could make. Look, I wanted to do. Let's go back a couple of steps. At Metropolitan Home. Which you founded as well? Which I founded. Coleman Andrews was one of my guys, you know, was the food editor, primary food writer. We had worked together for maybe 10 or 15 years because actually he worked on Apartment Life, which was the antecedent of Met Home.

8:12And you and him came together and did a lot of food reporting for Metropolitan Home. And clearly you both loved it so much. And you were like sneaking food. You also would sneak food in Newsweek where you were a top editor as well. So and Christopher Hirshheimer had moved from Galena, Illinois. She was married to an old an editor who I was very close to, Jim Hirshheimer, who and we had worked together in Apartment Life. I met Christopher. We became great friends. She had started a restaurant in Galena, Illinois, and then they moved to Bucks County. And Christopher became the food, long story short, became the food editor of Met Home.

8:57So before I even left Meredith, there was the idea that Coleman and Christopher and I would sit in a room and say, if we could make any magazine we wanted to, what would we do? And it was a food magazine. There was no question about it. It was a food magazine that we wanted to read. Yeah, you write in your memoir about how Savore was being founded. You're going against the gushing or insipid nature of most food writing then. That's what you wrote in your memoir. What was wrong with food writing at that point? Well, it was commodity-based. In other words, advertising was driving food editorial.

9:40So if you wanted X mayonnaise or mustard or rum or whatever, you would pander to them even to the extent of mentioning the brand in the recipe, which seems sacrilegious to me. I mean, why would we, you know, that's just sick. What are we doing here if we're putting like the brand of the mayonnaise as like one? Yeah, yeah, yeah. What are we doing? I mean, you're not a reader service. And we realized that, well, at Met Home, we had developed a very important food program. Coleman grew up with Alice and Jonathan and Larry Forgione. All those people were his buddies. Waters and Waxman. Yes. Sorry.

10:25Sorry. All good. We can go first name with those guys. But they were West Coast and actually the first time I ever met Coleman in the flesh was in Michael's in Santa Monica and Jonathan Waxman was his chef. So that was way, that was apartment life days. So we've known each other. We've kind of been on the same wavelength. And when Met Home became the kind of preeminent contemporary magazine for architecture and design, it also became a food magazine. Yeah. And because you saw right away that they went hand in hand. But see, we need to back up and just give our listeners context. This is like in the 1980s, which is food was not a hobby.

11:18It was very much a trade. It was very much an afterthought. But you saw the storytelling and you saw the editorial. And we saw the kitchens. We came in through the kitchen door. And then it was all about who was doing the equivalent of what architects and designers were doing in the home in the kitchen. Who was making the food that was our food that we were really excited about. So Coleman and Christopher and I sat in my office, and I picture this to this day. I don't have the notes, but we conjured up a magazine called Home Cooking, and it was what we were going to do. Fast forward to Met Home Get Sold after I was there for 11 years as editor.

12:15I decided not to go with it to Hachette, where it was this new home. And when we met Chris Muir, who was launching a publishing company that was demographically geared to the same readers that we were serving at Met Home, and he said, do you think you can do a food magazine? We said, we really want to do a food magazine. We have the notes. We've been talking about it. We have been, you know, so that's what, that's really, oh, so you asked about several. with an S. So he had met this Daniel Bonnier who was, as I say, a spur of the family of the Bonnier Publishing Company in Sweden. And he said, could you do this magazine here in America?

13:01So I went to Paris and met with Daniel and it was, he was lovely. And they had a, it was a lovely magazine, very photographically driven. But still very much the norm. A little bit less the norm. It wasn't as commercial as most food magazines. Oh, okay. So that's a positive. Even French. And they used very good photographers. They went on location, but they still had pictures where the wine bottle had the cap still on it in the picture with the glasses of the wine. We had that first issue translated and it's just we we just thought, you know what, in a way we're more sophisticated. Yeah. Well, editorially you were.

13:51I mean, it was New York City publishing in the late 80s and that was like the center of the world for publishing. Well, and we thought, how do we differentiate ourselves? Because there are plenty of food magazines in America then. Well, let's go over the set. I mean, we've got B.A. is happening. So Bon Appetit was, I don't think, as yet owned by Condé Nast. It was still published on the West Coast. There was Food and Wine, which was an American Express publishing adventure, which was the counterpart to Travel and Leisure. And there was Gourmet. Yep. And Gourmet was a long-standing, old, venerable magazine.

14:34Hadn't been... Yeah, it hadn't been Ruth Reuschold yet. Well, they didn't realize they needed to do that. Right. It was an old, for like very affluent Upper East Side. Well, I think it was kind of your grandmother's magazine. I think it was something. I think it was your grandmother went to San Francisco and she had a meal at the top of the Clift Hotel. And she wanted to know what was in that meal and how that duck was done. And that was kind of – it was an old, very old-fashioned – Ruth writes about that in her memoir about the previous – before Gourmet. It's very interesting to talk to her about that.

15:12So the competitive – and what about like Better Homes and Gardens and like some of those women's magazines? So they were mass. Yeah. And the genius of Chris Meir was that he realized you would never – you could never – Better Homes and Gardens famously had 6 ,666 readers. That was their thing. And you if you were editing to a targeted audience, you had to charge them more money and you had to have fewer of them because it was the cream of of that demographic. And he was smart enough to know that's how you had to market to them. OK, so your task is to translate this French publication that wasn't really written that well and had some decent editorial and.

16:02And it had sever with an S. Sever with an S. And we. Which is like a big point because with an S it's like what does that mean in English? So Daniel and I, I remember it was snowing in Paris that night and we sat in a little restaurant and we looked at each other. There's no way. Nobody's going to know what sever means to begin with with an S. So happily the word in French works with an S or without. Right. Happily. Flavor or flavors basically is the same translation. So we had an agreement. We had the first issue translated, and it was so bad. Yeah, the writing was not. The writing was just not there.

16:43Yeah, the writing wasn't good. And so our ambition had to be, this was a magazine. It started really with the marketing. If you were going to get an affluent, well-educated audience that would attract the advertisers that you needed to make this product happen, you needed to charge enough money. In order to charge enough money for that, you had to have beautiful paper, you had to have incredible printing, and you needed to be about things that were not seven ways to do pork chops. So, Doherty, let's dive into that because that's the important distinction. When you launched in 1993. Four. But you started putting it together in 93.

17:25Right, right, right, right. But your first issue came in 1994. you know, you're thinking that this can't be about five ways to do this or that. You needed to enter through the kitchen door that you're speaking about, but you needed to take your camera crew with you and you needed to start taking reportage photography, which to me is the greatest legacy of your publications of horror. It is what has changed food media, changed me, personally influenced me a great deal, tremendously, for the way I think about taste in all of my cookbooks. But I want to know, how did you make that happen from issue one?

18:03Well, remember, Met Home had a really very well-developed food program. So we had gone on location and we knew we just disdained the prop, the fake thing. Yes. The world had done that and seen that. And that wasn't going to be credible. And the magazine had credibility in its core. Yeah. So you had to not mess around. You had to not fake it. Which is such a key point because even today, to this day, a lot of food publications and cookbooks are shot in the studio. And there's whoopsies, which means like that thing of spilled whatever that randomly appears on a cloth napkin, which doesn't have any place in that setting.

18:50And that piece, that utensil has no place, that fork has no place there. And so you're like, I want to reject that. So how do you make this magazine first part? And second part is what's issue one's story lineup? Take us back to that. Okay. So basically we had decided it was going to be called Sever without an S. Our first story was taking Zarela Martinez to Oaxaca. So we pulled, it was like a hat trick because there was a magazine whose title you couldn't pronounce, the food of Oaxaca you couldn't pronounce. And on the cover, instead of a chef or a chicken, a turkey or whatever, there was a young cook from Oaxaca.

19:36A portrait. Yeah, a portrait of a real person who was in that restaurant that day. And that reportage was very, very important to us. Our compact with our reader was, we'll deliver the honest, the real good. We'll do the research. We'll go to the place where the food is born, and we'll bring you back those stories. And that was our holy grail. Yeah, your North Star. And then Christopher became a photographer. She was not a photographer when we started the magazine. She was a food editor. She was a wonderful cook. But she was not a photographer, and she just damn taught herself how to do it. And this is like pre-digital or it's like, I mean, are you pasting up at this point?

20:28Oh, yeah. There's no like, there's no computers involved. No, no, no. There are computers and there are. Well, yeah, there's computers involved in the layout, but you're pasting up your pages, essentially. I can't even remember. I mean, we were certainly choosing everything on light boxes from real film. There's light boxes involved. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think we were doing digital layouts at that point. You probably had Cork Express or early Photoshop. We did. Early Adobe. We did. We did. I said Adobe. I'm thinking too much about food. I'm thinking too much about food here.

21:05We pour that sauce all over. Oh, your computer would be great. Early Adobe. But let's talk about when you launch with this Oaxacan young chef with a word that no one really knows. And as an aside, Oaxaca still is undercover. In this day, like we, it's a tourist destination, but we still don't get it right in food media. The fact that you're covering in 1994 is amazing. What is the response? We actually did a focus group. We mocked up some covers. The grandmother, how your grandmother makes crepes or something like that. And so the people in the focus groups were demographically correct and they it didn't bother them that they didn't know what the magazine was called or how to pronounce it.

21:52They got that it was authentic. Yeah. And they really coveted that because we're talking about a demographic of, you know, these are folks who are high earning and understand aesthetics. And I would imagine are likely pretty coastal, I would think, versus civil audience. What's interesting is that we got we had so many food professionals. Yeah. I never thought we would. I thought, oh, well, they know all this. They don't know all this. That's very interesting. We had we put saffron on the cover and I heard from so many chefs. They didn't quite know where it came from. They didn't understand the stamens of the crocuses that were pulled out by hand.

22:34That's such a great point you bring up because, you know, the Savor 100 was coveted by food professionals in my life. I know plenty of chefs in their 40s and 50s who have every issue of Savor 100. That was great. Well, that was a magazine that we dreamt up one day because it was, what are you going to do in January? And how about that? And then everybody. Also, we were – I knew a lot of stuff by then. I mean, you always learn and you're always getting smarter. But I knew that it wasn't about fancy offices and I knew that it wasn't about hierarchies of editorial people. Our meetings were always everybody, every assistant, every art director, every photo editor, everybody, every kitchen person.

23:26They were all in on the editorial meetings. And you could tell whether an idea was interesting enough by the way their eyes would light up or not. And you had to argue. And I don't mean in a bad way. And there was never – it was always just us because it was such a small company. And we were making the ethos. We were creating it. And we just wanted to be inclusive. And we were. And I think that helped. So that, for example, with the Severo 100, everybody brought in things and had to kind of talk about it and sell it to the rest of the group. And that was an amazing dynamic. And we got that on the page.

24:11And the person who bought it brought in the idea would write the thing, would research and write it. Yeah, it's pre-internet. And you're thinking, you know, this is all obvious now. You could, you know, search for many different things. But back then, editorial was so important for spreading access to all sorts of food and all sorts of cultures and being extremely inclusive. And Sivore 100, unlike other publications which are doing it mostly from a white point of view, this certainly was the opposite. If you read the Sivore 100s in the 90s, there's food from all over the world and representation is at the highest level.

24:53Exactly. And that was that's the intention. And that was what we promised to our readers. We're going to give you something you're not going to find other places. You talk about having a small staff and I'm sure you had a test kitchen and you had overheads back early, like 94, 95. What are the financials looking like? I mean, historically, this is a time when magazines were thriving. You look at Condé Nast, you know, they had this was they're thriving. You know, editors were making millions of dollars, literally, which is crazy to think as an editor that people actually made that much money. How are you fitting into this ecosystem?

25:25Okay, so we are not having the town cars come and pick us up. We did have a test kitchen, which I went to Ikea with our design editor from Garden Design, because we were publishing Garden Design at the same time. And we picked out the kitchen. And I think Christopher, we all, all of us designed it. We thought, okay, we need to send her this. We need these cabinets. We need whatever. It was an Ikea kitchen. It was great. And it was right next to the conference room where we all had our offices. And it was a big, it was called the Green Room. It had been an ad agency. And so it was the open place.

26:07And we just left it open. We called it the Green Room. This is not the 32nd Street location that you eventually moved to. Where was this location? This was on 6th Avenue. Yeah. In Soho. 100th Avenue of the Americas. Wow. Spring Street. Yeah. Yeah. Soho in the 90s having doing editorial out of there. Oh, wow. Super great. I said, you know, heaven forbid you had to go buy something like stockings. You could go buy important sculpture at lunch. And you had Dina DeLuca right there. Exactly. The original location, RIP. Exactly. You know, that's a sad story, the mighty dewfall. But back to the original question, financially, was it working?

26:50Was the magazine working? It was working. Perhaps there was a little over-promising to investors. Over what happened after six years, Chris Muir and his then-partner Doug Peabody wound up selling the company to a company called World Publications that did things like surfing magazines and whatever, but they were niche magazines. And so ultimately, they didn't have what it took to sustain it. So that's the tough moment. So six years, that six-year period. It was actually, I mean, I left after seven. And then Coleman Andrews took the magazine on for another five years or so. Yeah. So you left in 2001.