Ruth Reichl's time at 'Gourmet' inspires her debut novel

There's nothing bashful about the title of Ruth Reichl's first novel: Delicious!

And why not? She may be a debut novelist, but Reichl has the recipe for best-selling success, as she's proved with her tasty, revealing memoirs about her life as a foodie (Tender at the Bone, Comfort Me with Apples, Garlic and Sapphires).

The title of her new book isn't a self-review (at least we think not). Delicious! is the name of a fictional magazine very much like Gourmet, the culinary institution that was suddenly shuttered in 2009, while Reichl was editor in chief.

"I've always wanted to try writing fiction but I wasn't sure I could do it," she says. "I wanted to try to do the hardest thing I could think of to do. It was a way to get out of my depression after the closing of Gourmet."

Early reviews for the novel, which arrives on May 6 from Random House, are strong. O Magazine calls it "compulsively readable … emotional comfort food."

Young Billie Breslin has barely walked in the door when Delicious! is closed by its owners, but she's left behind in the old Timbers Mansion in Manhattan to answer calls from readers (including batty Mrs. Cloverly, who mangles every recipe). In the magazine's library, Billie comes across a secret room and discovers letters written to James Beard during World War II, from a young girl named Lulu Swan, setting off a bit of a treasure hunt.

On weekends, Billie works at a wonderful family-owned cheese shop and develops a crush on a customer known as Mr. Complainer.

Reichl, 66, a New Yorker and former restaurant critic for The New York Times, says she drew on her "love of the city and its diversity and the food shops and the people in the food shops" for her novel. (For readers who will want to rush to that fictional cheese shop, it was inspired by Di Palo's in Little Italy.)

Her decade at Gourmet, Reichl says, "was an extraordinary time. I loved working in such a collaborative atmosphere." She mourns its loss and says she "was totally taken by surprise" when the magazine was shut down for financial reasons during the recession. "If Condé Nast was unhappy with what was happening they should have fired me, not closed the magazine."

Reichl has a contract to write a memoir about her time at Gourmet, but first she's finished a cookbook/memoir with the working title Simple Pleasures (no publication date yet).

Writing fiction, she says, was both "incredibly difficult and incredibly fun," and she loved discovering the way "characters live inside of you, and you cannot wait to find out what's going to happen to them."

She's writing a second novel, but the woman who was once a master of disguises as a restaurant reviewer won't divulge the ingredients just yet.

"I feel like you write it or you talk about it, but you don't do both," she says.