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Colman Andrews, co-founder and EIC of food porn bible Saveur, has left the magazine and is moving to Gourmet. Keith Kelly reports that, "Andrews and Gourmet Editor-in-Chief Ruth Reichl go back to their days at New West magazine, when he was the food editor and Reichl worked for him." How way back? After the jump, an excerpt from a 2001 interview with Reichl explains.

Consider the way she writes about her affair. At 31, she meets a man she refers to only as "the food editor." He's pompous, she thinks, and older; she, in her turn, tries too hard to seem knowledgeable and finds herself waxing fervent about black truffles, champagne vintages and tiny-gauge caviars — subjects she knows nothing about.

But when they have dinner at L.A.'s legendary Ma Maison, all pretenses drop away. The beluga caviar was "seductively fruity." There were "baked oysters wrapped in lettuce, sprinkled with caviar and bathed in beurre blanc [and] terrine de foie gras with warm toast. The flavors danced and the soft substances slid down my throat."
The next morning, waking up in his bed, she is momentarily horrified. "What was it that I found so irresistible about this man? I replayed the night in my head — the caviar, the oysters, the foie gras, the cigars. It had been like a wonderful dream, all my fantasies made real." Fantasies about "the man from another time, the bon vivant who had unabashedly devoted himself to food."

As it happens, the lover was Colman Andrews, now editor of Saveur magazine, and in a friendly way Reichl's rival, since it was the success of the extravagant, literary and sensual Saveur that convinced the publishers of the increasingly frumpy Gourmet that it needed a bonne vivante of its own. The affair, which hadn't been public knowledge until the book's galleys got around, will undoubtedly be a food trendies' gossip sensation, but it really says more about their mutual sensual attentions, and how we have all benefited from their fearlessness.

Man, we need to read us some more Gourmet. And smoke a cigarette.

SAVEUR COFOUNDER ANDREWS EXITS FOR GOURMET [NYP]
A second serving of sensual memories from food writer Ruth Reichl [Bookpage]