Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

I think Saveur comes about the closest to Nirvana. Just the right amount of exotic locations and fare with the homespun local stuff (try getting past the first 8 or 10 pages in under an hour...) - AND the best food photography ever - Saveur makes me spring out of my comfy chair and head for the kitchen when I'm reading it. I've made some incredible dishes from it.

There are other more technical magazines (like Fine Cooking and Cook's Illustrated) and more mainstream stuff (like Gourmet and Bon Appetit) but Saveur is the perfect mix of ingredients spread onto magazine pages and bound for shipment to salivating foodies everywhere.

The ideal food magazine is Serious Eats.

For me the quest would start with "Tell me something new."

Or alternately, tell me the same thing but in a new way with a new voice.

Bon Appetit is replaying the same song in the same key with the same recipes and Junior League wannabes photos as many other places have done and as they have done for some number of years.

Donna Hay is hipper with a bit more but for me - give me more than what exists on the plate. Think beyond the tongue and tastebuds.

Saveur is good in that way but again the travels mostly have been taken before in other readings.

If you want to cook, get Cook's Illustrated. It will teach you how and the recipes will work unless, of course, you decide you know better and then alter them heh heh.

Gourmet is getting to where I like it again - it does appear that people who write have brains and use them. The articles are not the same as everywhere else - there is a spark of individuality - footsteps are heading in some directions not taken previously. The issue on Latin foods is an example. Things simply were put together differently. A different recipe for a "foodie" magazine though not boldly so or in-your-face-so.

I'll take the artwork and some columns from Gastronomica, the recipes and tone from Cucina Italiana (the Italian edition) , the photography from Essen und Trinken (simple, light-filled, about the food without requiring it have a make-over first). I'll take a magazine made of cheap paper without a glossy cover, for to me most magazines are ephemera and should act so, not as if they were striving to be books but not quite making it simply because of their nature.

I'd like to read some essays of quality that do not come from "celebrity chefs" or celebrity chef groupies. In many cases a bit more humor would be appreciated rather than the studied solemnity of the docent who is bowing to the stove or the determinedly cheerful plodding away of those who want to eat healthy.

Tell me something new. Please don't give me recipes I've read of in twenty other places thirty other times. If you have to do so from lack of anything else being written then please make it amusing somehow.

I'd like bits of food history and the history of eating, of gastronomy dropped into the mix here and there. Not too much, just a dab here and there. Something to grab onto, you know. History does repeat itself and when one can look beyond the tip of one's nose it is quite interesting.

Link food to art, to music, to literature, to sociology, to psychology - but without an academic or preachy tone. Link it to politics once in a while too for those that like that sort of thing.

Show me a farm where things are grown - show me the people that grow them. Write about what makes them great or dull or merely passable, and show me where else on earth these things grow and how the quality level and cost compares to where I live.

Last but not least, give me a foodie horoscope. Horoscopes are always useful and if they are not at the very least they are funny.

I'll think of more, later, no doubt. :)

Diner Journal, produced by employees, owners, and others at a place I have never been because I don't live in NYC called Marlow and Sons, is an excellent magazine. The one issue I have seen is very nice: recipes, great information about purveyors and their products, well written, artistic, one of the best. Only problem is they only produce a few a year.

The only food magazine I subscribe to in print is Gourmet, but I do like America's Test Kitchen/Cook's Illustrated.
I find Gourmet inspirational, and I love www.epicurious.com as a resource. As an improvisational cook, I love the way Cook's Illustrated approaches recipes: they look at all the different approaches, try them all and then tell you which they thought worked best and why ... invaluable!
My brother is a professional chef, and he likes Saveur and Gastronimica.

I've subscribed to them all at one time or another, but they seem to become repetative after a couple years.

Right now I enjoy reading the Edible Communites publications, but otherwise I get all my foodie reading off the internet.

Late to this discussion, but astounded no one mentioned The Art of Eating quarterly. Magnificent.

Mmm. That brings up the question of whether chefs are foodies, zapatista. :) Heh.