On the Side: For Gourmet's Reichl, book-tour show goes on

Nowhere is it written how to comport oneself upon having been unhorsed right in the middle of a victory lap.

But Ruth Reichl, locks tousled and banged in that trademark Grace Slick cascade, tunic-and-pants outfit right out of the '70s, was giving it - on a book-tour stop here Monday - a chin-up and not uncharming college try.

"What's next?" she answered a questioner at a dinner at Supper, the restaurant at 10th and South: "Beats me."

She is (or rather was, for 10 years) the editor in chief of Gourmet, the 68-year-old dowager of food magazines she'd whipped into the 21st century, in her estimation shocking the fuddy-duddies with pieces on the "Tomato Slaves" broiling in Florida's fields, and Water (yes, a "Water Issue"), the Latino culinary revolution, and David Foster Wallace's unsparing essay on the final agonies of the innocent Maine lobster.

Yes, Gourmet had still relied heavily on luxury lifestyle and travel spreads, and luxury advertising, in a suddenly unluxurious moment. Yes, the ranks of the Rachaels and the Paulas were swelling. And, yes, serious and adventurous food journalism was proliferating, too.

But with a telephone-book-sized collection of 1,000 "Recipes for the Contemporary Kitchen," Gourmet Today, hot off the presses, and Reichl's global cooking-school romp, Gourmet's Adventures With Ruth, set to debut on public television, it seemed an inopportune moment two weeks ago for Gourmet publisher Conde Nast to pull the plug.

Inopportune, maybe. But pull it Conde Nast did, abruptly terminating the magazine with its November issue on the newsstands (a turkey on the cover), and bonus stickers on the new cookbook offering free subscriptions to the instantly extinct title.

Reichl would have liked to say goodbye, she said. Have had a swan-song issue. Instead she was left unceremoniously rushing to have the doors locked to the unstaffed Gourmet library, determined to keep the 3,500-volume cookbook collection (and card file of unpublished restaurant recipes) - carefully pruned and artfully curated since 1941 - in one piece.

Adding humiliation, the publisher spared the decidedly middler-brow Bon Appetit. But that was only the start of Reichl's occasions of awkwardness and even injury.

"You have a good look," a woman complimented her near Sixth and Race. "But you still look your age."