New site heaven for serious foodies

Heads up, foodies, there’s a new culinary kid online promising nothing short of died-and-gone-to-heaven.

If you’re in need of a fascinating way to cook asparagus (cure it in salt and sugar), or a product so exclusive only top chefs were previously deemed worthy, then Gilttaste.com should have you drooling. Oh, and you get a dash of Ruth Reichl for a saucy blend of high-profile editorial content and high-end commerce.

The idea, Reichl said in an interview last week, is to make Gilt Taste the whole delicious package.

“The onus is on us to make sure that it’s all great, that what we’re selling is really great in addition to the content that we’re putting up around it,” said the former editor-in-chief of Gourmet magazine. “For somebody like me, who comes from a traditional print background, that’s really new.”

The site went live May 24 and already had nearly 350,000 page views by the following afternoon. Was it the high-def photos of water-kissed tomatoes, the fiddlehead fern and spicy-sweet wild ramp set for $35.95? How about the recipes from Melissa Clark or Barry Estabrook’s expose on fracking and the food supply?

Success, said Food & Wine magazine editor-in-chief Dana Cowin, will be in the mix.

“Gilt Taste has put together a group of some of the smartest people in the foodie intelligentsia,” she said. “I expect high quality, tremendous thoughtfulness and extreme deliciousness from them.”