‘Gourmet’ Co-Founder Sam Dean’s ‘Grub Street Diet’

Amid the media-industry doom that has ushered in 2026, one publishing story stands out as a wild, hilarious bright spot. When Sam Dean, a journalist and author, learned Condé Nast had allowed the Gourmet trademark to expire, he snatched it up for himself and — along with four co-founders — relaunched it this month as a newsletter. They moved up the debut to coincide with the New Year and a New York Times piece announcing the project, which overlapped with a trip Dean had planned. “I was not supposed to be a 14-hour time difference away,” he says. “When that story came out, it was 9 p.m. Taipei time, and I was walking down the street cackling about this ridiculous idea I came up with a year ago and roped some people into — It’s live.” He spent last week readjusting to Pacific time and catching up on the group chat with his Gourmet colleagues while getting his bearings back with some tacos de buche, seafood pancakes, and lots of time with friends. 

Wednesday, January 21
Fifteen hours after takeoff in Taipei and through the cosmic wonder of the international date line, I touch down in Los Angeles at 10 a.m., 20 minutes before I left Taiwan. I am starving.

We’re staying in East Hollywood on the same block where I lived with my wife, Mariam, for nearly five years until we decamped to Vermont for her job. One of our former neighbors is usually out of town (he’s a cinematographer, and the movie biz has dried up), and he sublets his place to us for cheap. I love this zone despite the eerie presence of Scientology’s big blue HQ up the block. It’s simultaneously Little Armenia and Thai Town and — like most places in L.A. — mostly Latino. A 20-minute walk takes you to the bourgeois bars and coffee shops of Los Feliz, Silver Lake, and the stretch on Virgil. An Erewhon appeared on the edge of the area while we lived here. I resented its presence, but I was not surprised.

En route to the apartment, I text my dad, Rex, to see if he wants to grab lunch. After we make a pit stop to rinse off the plane scuzz, he picks us up in his old Prius (adorned with his handmade “Feed Gaza” decals) and we scoot up to Carousel on Hollywood, the grande dame of the neighborhood’s Lebanese-Armenian restaurants. It’s a casual but white-tablecloth kind of place, and there’s always a big family function going on — usually a birthday but this time a funeral reception. (կյանք քեզ to Mrs. Soykurt.) We sit outside by the parking lot and order a veggie meze plate, kibbeh, and fattoush to split. In the light of this fried bulgur, muhammarah, eggplant, and lemon, we are cleansed.

The afternoon passes in a bleary haze, half nap, half phone. Nozlee Samadzadeh and Amiel Stanek, the cooking editors (among the other hats they wear) at the new Gourmet, are at home in Brooklyn and Hudson, respectively, testing a recipe for chicken wings and rice noodles braised in an aromatic liquid for an upcoming edition. One of the many joys of starting this thing with a crew scattered across the country is that, no matter what, someone is always eating something good.

A plan for the evening comes into focus around sunset. Alex Tatusian, another Gourmet co-founder, is going to pick us up with his partner, Sharanya Durvasula, and we’ll hit the Wednesday wine tasting at Lou up on Hillhurst.

Suddenly hungry again, I resolve to get tacos for everyone. I hit the low-key family stand on Edgemont, where they’ve got four types of meat crackling over charcoal, and load up a plate (de buche, al pastor, pollo, carne asada). We eat them off the hood of Alex’s car in the Lou parking lot, then taste our way through five Italian bottles. I love the Lazio Cesanese, but the crew prefers a northern slow-pressed Vernaccia. We buy both.

Perversely amped up now, hitting dawn in Taipei time, we resolve to go hang chez Tatusian for another stretch. Alex and Sharanya have an incredible bar at home — strange bottles of amari they bought in Italy, dusty whiskeys from thrift stores in Arizona — and, most important, a divine sense of bottomless hospitality. My addled mind decides I want a Rusty Nail (Scotch, Drambuie) with an extremely petite little snifter of amaro on the side. We get a car home and collapse.

Thursday, January 22
A strange sleep. I wake up and our Thursday edition with a recipe for Alison Roman’s pork cooked in milk has hit the internet. I have given myself the task of being the customer-support specialist, so I spend a few hours sifting through reactions, pitches, and technical issues in the editors’ inbox. All of our subscribers are very excited to see Gourmet live again, but some are a little confused as to what exactly we’re doing. I respond to them all, promising we will be interesting, more recipes are coming, and, yes, it’s okay to cook this dish with lactose-free milk.

Someone needs to go grocery shopping for lunch, and we decide that someone is me. I grab my backpack and a few totes and set out for Jons, but within a block I realize I need help. The carnitas stand is open on the corner of Lexington. By this time of the morning, the giant cauldrons are clean, the carnitas are waiting to be chopped, and the chicharrones (both the fluffy fried pork rinds and the crackling batons of belly) are settled in a big plastic container. Not wanting to spoil my appetite, I get just one taco, but when they give me half a pound of meat on top of the tortilla, I do not object.

On the way back from the store, I stop at the tent on the opposite corner from the carnitas tent. Fifteen dollars gets me half a charcoal-grilled chicken, plus rice and beans and tortillas and grilled onions and many salsas. Mariam and I eat well.

More emails, and out of the editors’ thread appears a vision: For some reason, Cale Weissman, another co-founder on the team, is wearing a tuxedo and dining at the Waldorf Astoria tonight. He’s harsh but fair. The Waldorf salad: “bottom 10 salad tbh.” The braised beef: “sad.” A bright spot: “the dessert tray was actually top-tier/amazing mini paris-brest.” Kathy Hochul is in attendance, but Cale eventually realizes, when a fellow guest mistakes him for a waiter, that he did not need to wear a tuxedo.

The evening in Los Angeles brings a dinner party at the Tatusian residence with other friends in attendance. We begin with a nip-size bottle of 1950s Scotch that Alex got in Ravenna and some batinjan bil rumman wal laban he has made, then move to Thai takeout and the wine we bought the night before. On the thread, Nozlee is taking a knee and chugging a Modelo after gay beer-league hockey. Jet lag is beginning to hit me, and if I’m being honest, so are about three too many glasses of wine. The night blurs, and we head home after midnight.

Friday, January 23
I awake on the couch at dawn. Underslept, woozy, I scrape together a leftover breakfast of cold beans and chicken.

We have a group interview with Max at Hell Gate to talk co-op media projects. (We’re running Gourmet as a no-investor co-op and giving freelancers who write stories or recipes a cut of the profits for the three months after their piece goes out). I take the Zoom wandering around the neighborhood in the sun, wishing the passionfruit vines that grow semi-wild were in fruiting season, too timid to steal a few tangerines from a neighbor’s front-yard tree even though they never seem to eat them.

As I wait out my jet-lag hangover, Amiel appears to be preparing a winter feast at his home in Hudson. He somehow got a restaurant-supply company to deliver eight pounds of lamb chops, two and a half pounds of Pecorino, fresh bay leaves, and a case of grapefruits overnight. He is now squeezing fresh Greyhounds for everyone, according to his photos on the editors’ thread, and a chef friend is over to butcher and roast a leg of deer their other friend shot in his Kingston yard. Amiel and his partner, Lauren, who’s about to open a diner called Doves, are somehow hosting this snow-globe fantasia while taking care of their two tiny kids.

By sunset, I’m semi-revived. We walk the mile-and-change to a place called Bar Etoile to meet some friends for dinner. It’s a relatively new offshoot from the people who run Domaine LA, a long-standing wine store on Melrose, and Mariam’s opening question about Umbrian wine summons the somm-owner, who tempts us with a very expensive Slovenian field blend in a clay bottle before we land on a more reasonable pair of wines in the $60 zone. The most memorable dish, as often the case, is an appetizer: yams in a guajillo sabayon, a kind of creamy egg sauce.

At this point, my body’s internal clock is fully cuckoo. We go to a newish bar on Virgil, which occupies the former spot of a rum bar that closed due to a family embezzlement scandal, which in turn occupied the spot of an incredible Filipino karaoke dive called the Smog Cutter. The drinks are very good, but the music is playing at an excruciating volume, and they’re hosting some kind of nootropic nonalcoholic-drink-product promo event.

I’m ready to go home, eyelids drooping, but then Alex asks if I want to go see a man play saxophone in a mall in Koreatown. Yes, of course I do. A ten-dollar Lyft later I find myself riding an escalator to Nathanial Young’s hauntingly beautiful melody on a tenor sax to a crowd of what must be 1,000 L.A. cool kids — and I mean kids, 20-somethings in black T-shirts and complicated pants — plus a handful of uncool jazz millennials like myself. We’re all stacked up and down the central atrium of the mall on 6th and Berendo, the one with the H Mart and the spa on the third floor. The sax man switches to soprano and rips into an Ornette Coleman classic.

The ad hoc show wraps right at eleven, and we walk over to DGM (technically DwitGolMok, but it might have pulled a KFC and gone for acronym only), a semi-hidden Korean drinking-food spot. We split a seafood pancake among the crew and a few bottles of Kloud and Chamisul before I call it.

Saturday, January 24
I wake up uncontrollably early again, sun up, dogs barking, and do more newsletter tech support. Email is a strange creature, and Yahoo doesn’t like us. We’re also getting some great pitches, which I will not reveal here.

My sister Sophia lives close by, and she and her friend pick me up for lunch at a newish place called Chainsaw that I want to check out. It started as a pop-up in the chef’s garage in Echo Park, and I’d been to a couple of the events back when it was getting going. Now it has a brick-and-mortar not far from Bar Etoile. I get the sense that a real-estate guy must be pushing hard to get new restaurants in the area, a working-class zone with a shrine to Santa Muerte around the corner. When we show up, Chainsaw is slammed.

The chef, Karla Subero Pittol, was born in Venezuela, and the menu at the café leans in that direction: We order coffees, arepas, and an off-menu salad and lomo saltado I’d seen on Instagram. I am prepared to be annoyed at waiting many minutes to get $12 arepas, but when they arrive and we eat them on top of the sidewalk telecom-access box, they are undeniable — crunchy and crumbly, deliciously sauced.

Back home, I flop on the couch intending to nap but then see the news that federal agents have killed a protester, Alex Pretti, on the streets of Minneapolis. I cannot sleep. We start texting on the editors’ thread, and Nozlee, who had just been bruléeing the top of a spumoni ice-cream cake with a tiny pen-size torch at a friend’s party in Philadelphia, begins reaching out to Twin Cities friends to source a story on how the protest movement is feeding itself out in the cold.

I had planned to go east to the San Gabriel Valley for a dish I became obsessed with in Taiwan — fatty pork over mustard greens that have been pickled, dried, and then rehydrated — before stopping by a friend’s party, but, napless and upset, I have to bail on it. Dark falls, and I eat some leftover chicken Mariam pulls together into sandwiches. A friend had agreed to come over for a quiet hang, so I walk to Erewhon, reluctantly since it is the one wine store open within a few blocks, and pick up an eccentric rosé on sale, an amaro, and some overpriced potato chips. We lounge around for a couple of hours, then I give sleeping another shot.

Sunday, January 25
What is sleep? Does it count if you just ruminate with your eyes closed for a couple of hours?

Through some complicated car-borrowing logistics, I end up downtown and hop on the Gold Line to get to Boyle Heights, where I’m meeting up with a chef friend, Rogie Hernandez, to catch up and talk about what he wants to do for Gourmet. He has worked in kitchens across L.A. and staged with a Michelin-starred chef in Bangkok a couple of years ago, but when I met him through a music-journalist friend, his main thing was throwing DIY shows at the mechanic shop where his dad worked.

Rogie’s now head chef at a new upscale spot on the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood called Galerie. He was promoted from sous after his boss decided to become a fish rep, and now he’s running the kitchen from top to bottom, hitting the farmers’ market in the morning for ingredients and closing up late at night. But it’s his day off, so he picks me up at the train station and takes me to Santa Rita Jalisco, a truck with a dedicated dining area. On his rec, I get some al pastor tacos and the pescuezos, fried chicken necks served with red salsa and tortillas. Jonathan Gold once described one of these as “a tanned, meaty cylinder surmounted by an Elizabethan collar of pure crunch: hidden bits of chewy meat and a corona of pure, fatty pleasure.” He remains correct.

We stop back at Rogie’s place for a little beer, then hit the road with his girlfriend and another friend in town to cover the Grammys to go get more food. I’d thought the plan was to head west, back toward my apartment, but instead Rogie hangs a left and we’re off to Monterey Park, ending up at the Hong Kong Café for some milk-coffee-tea and fried rice-noodle rolls as a snack. He graciously schleps me back to East Hollywood after, then heads out into the night in pursuit of another hang.

The weekend ends with a little oasis of calm. Mariam and I are due for dinner with two friends, one a literature professor and the other a novelist, at their home up Beachwood. When we arrive, their camellia tree is in full bloom in the dark and classical music is on the turntable. They pour some Kirkland Champagne, left over from New Year’s, and make us salmon, a lentil salad, a green salad, and good bread with butter. My body welcomes the vegetables. The finale is a mango yogurt parfait — the yogurt made by Ari’s at the Hollywood Farmers’ Market — and a soothing rooibos blend called Rolex Gold, which we are assured is sold by a permanently stoned teaman and served with some milk.

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