Two years after founders Allyson Mace and Catherine Neville established an online advertising network for restaurants, they printed and distributed the first edition of Sauce Magazine in St. Louis. It was 2001; people still read magazine articles on paper; Mace and Neville were still in a relationship.
In the first decade of publishing, Sauce grew to become the most vocal outlet for the food scene in St. Louis. While The Riverfront Times, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and St. Louis Magazine all had their share of restaurant news and reviews, Sauce was singularly the food magazine. Its hefty prints were adorned with bold covers and featured reviews, recipes, and interviews. Every month, they would be stacked near the front doors of restaurants or on the racks beside grocery store counters. Those magazines would eventually end up on my dining room table, and I did not know it at the time, but the arrival of their bright covers marked the beginning of the end of print journalism in St. Louis.
Almost a decade after the magazine was first founded, Catherine Neville announced her departure from Sauce; she and Mace had broken up almost two years earlier, but had remained in a professional partnership. In March of 2010, Neville sold her share of the magazine to Mace, teasing that she had “things in the works” that were “incredible projects.” And with curiously worded possessives, she told a food reporter, “We decided it’s time to move on to the next chapter of my professional life.”
While The Riverfront Times, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and St. Louis Magazine all had their share of restaurant news and reviews, Sauce was singularly the food magazine. Its hefty prints were adorned with bold covers and featured reviews, recipes, and interviews.
Meanwhile, Mace remained at Sauce and kept the magazine independent. When her co-founder left her, Mace said she was “excited that I’m finally able to take over the magazine and take it to the next level.” In the meantime, just a few months later, Neville founded Feast Magazine, the only other contender in the same local food scene as Sauce.
By the time Neville first published this new magazine, the city’s print publications were already floundering: The parent company that birthed Feast was buying up local outlets, cutting costs, and laying off employees. The company, Lee Enterprises, proceeded to buy the St. Louis Post-Dispatch as well as the city’s outer-ring publications. Then it moved its newly acquired papers to subscription models in an attempt to improve dwindling profits. (The St. Louis Business Journal reported the bleak changes to local journalism in an article that now sits behind a subscription wall.)
Shortly after Feast debuted, its parent company found itself a billion dollars in debt and at risk of being delisted from the New York Stock Exchange. In reaction, Lee Enterprises laid off reporters—almost two dozen—across its papers. One of those laid off was Todd Smith, a reporter who, while covering a city council meeting in Kirkwood in February 2008, had taken a bullet through the hand and along his chest. (Between being shot and being fired, he remarked that “getting shot was worse.”)
While its parent company transitioned most of the local papers online, Feast remained in sumptuous, speckled, printed pages. The first issue of the magazine unveiled recipes from local chefs, interviews with restaurateurs, and a plethora of product endorsements. The articles read like thirty-second TV advertisements. They featured calls-to-action, imploring readers to stop by, to take a seat, to “try the rich, tangy lemon curd with mint foam.” Stories were short and punchy and positive, in line with Neville’s intent to promote the local food scene. Unlike Sauce, Feast did not print critical restaurant reviews; the choice of font was the only demarcation between stories and paid advertisements, through which the local Buick dealer stated of its latest models, “EVERY CURVE SEDUCES.”
By the time Neville first published this new magazine, the city’s print publications were already floundering: The parent company that birthed Feast was buying up local outlets, cutting costs, and laying off employees.
“We exist to excite our audience and also to foster success in the food industry,” Neville explained. “What creates success for restaurants, wineries, breweries and shops is meaningful exposure.” And according to Feast’s apparent editorial philosophy, harping on the pitfalls of restaurants, wineries, breweries, and shops would have been bad press. Even Sauce, for all its negative reviews, was also freely mixing commercial promotion with informative journalism. In this industry, a true story always ran the risk of degrading the culinary scene that both women wanted to elevate. But beyond printing commercials, Feast never really told stories.
Feast Magazine’s mission was to give readers insight on where to go, what to make, what to buy—not how to think. In that first hamburger-themed issue, readers did not get to know the old man who flipped burgers and liked to flirt with women from inside the drive-thru window. (Beyonding reading an endorsement of the burger joint, I wanted to learn about the General Motors employees who yelled their orders to the old man on account of their hearing loss after years of working at the plant.)
Years later, Neville would tell a reporter, “I’m not a person who’s interested in doing something that other people have done. You know, if I’m going to do something—if I’m going to create a platform—I want it to be unique. I want it to tell stories that aren’t already being told.” (Neville declined to be interviewed for this story, explaining that she did not want to contribute to any narratives about rivalries between the two publications.)
In one video feature about Feast, shot by the local PBS station, Neville reclined, champagne glass in hand—bright white smile beaming for the cameras—in the Vegetal chair, suitable for indoor and outdoor uses, available in six nature-inspired colors, marked for purchase at $555 at a shop in the Central West End. At the magazine’s launch party, Neville regaled an audience with her goal to distill the culinary scene into readers’ everyday lives. For the feature, she was wrapped in a suburban-chic cocktail dress; there was clear purpose in her exaggerated charm: the way she greeted guests with a short wave, quick smile, and slight brush of her golden-retriever hair—red-gold and wavy on a woman with that perfectly affable personality.
Even Sauce, for all its negative reviews, was also freely mixing commercial promotion with informative journalism. In this industry, a true story always ran the risk of degrading the culinary scene that both women wanted to elevate. But beyond printing commercials, Feast never really told stories.
“When she talks, she is hypnotic,” radio host McGraw Milhaven, who held food- and Feast-related chats with Neville on his morning show, told PBS. “The way she describes the food, the way the words roll off her tongue, half the time I have no idea what she’s talking about. But the words flow so beautifully. I just sit there and at the end of a segment, I just sit there and go”—he wipes an invisible waterfall of saliva from the bottom of his mouth—“OUUPH.”
A few pages into every edition of Feast (besides the ten-year anniversary paper), there is a Catherine Neville waiting, smiling, posing for a professional camera. Neville, adjoining her letter from the publisher, is sometimes lounging—legs crossed—on stools and settees and sofa chairs. Neville, mid-taping for the magazine’s video program, Feast TV, is sometimes speaking with a farmer or a chef or a duck hunter. And Neville—donning a single-breasted, eight-buttoned, cream-colored pant suit—or clad in a summertime white linen sundress—or with her hand resting on the belted hip of her silky, long-sleeve, dark-dark grey Victorian dress with a standing ruff—is standing at the window of a food truck, strutting along Soulard Market, or simply cut out from the background, fitted onto the page, the text having to adjust around her.
Neville’s ambitions stretched Feast far beyond those printed pages. The magazine hosted cooking classes and even held meet-and-greets with its columnists during happy hours at local restaurants. As her career unfolded, Neville would pick up a slate of honors for her success in the industry, including eight regional Emmy awards for Feast TV. She would also expand Feast’s coverage beyond the Metro East and across state lines, dwarfing the rival Sauce in size and scope. But not all readers appreciated her ventures: One declared on Reddit, “No, I am not driving 300 miles to buy a damn bottle of hot sauce.”
Alas, budget cuts at Feast’s parent company would cut Neville’s magazine down to size. Lee Enterprises would fire the magazine’s art director and issue more layoffs at the Post-Dispatch. (The Business Journal broke the news of the budget cuts behind another paywall.) A union representative for the city’s daily paper said of the parent company, “They’re in the content business and yet they keep cutting,” adding that, “At a certain point you’re a hamburger place putting lettuce on buns.” At least for a few more years, though, the smaller Sauce would stay afloat with Allyson Mace steering the ship.
The ex that stayed at the magazine was dark-haired and dimpled, with dark, round, absorbing eyes. Those eyes were often obscured behind ombre-colored aviators, and people who worked with Mace told me she was hard to read. (She never responded to my emails.) Mace grew up working for her father, a newspaper publisher, and then entered the food industry when she was young. One night, while she was waiting tables at a French restaurant in Clayton, a visiting businessman told her that he was surprised St. Louis had good restaurants. “Ouch,” Mace later recalled. “I took that personally.” By the time she returned home that night, she had already planned how she would prove the class of St. Louis’ culinary scene—and decided that she should be the one to do it.
Compared to her co-founder, Mace was more subdued: She was more serious, spoke with caution rather than splendor, and wore muted greys, blacks, and backwards hats. In 2011, she appeared on a local TV program called Best of STL in jet-black boots, black jeans, and a pale-black denim jacket. With Tom Cruise’s giddy swagger, she reminded viewers that, “for so long before Sauce Magazine, they talked about just The Hill or Ted Drewes… but now that Sauce Magazine’s really garnered the light of Food & Wine, and we’ve received ink in The New York Times, The Washington Post, we really are on the radar…”
When asked years later on St. Louis Public Radio if she had been worried when her ex began publishing Feast, Mace replied that it was not a hard time at all. By then, she had been named one of the “100 Most Influential Magazine Media Executives” by the Fair Media Council. She said dryly, cooly, again like Tom Cruise, “I had no worries whatsoever. If anything, we’ve actually done better.” (The reporter who had asked Mace, “Did you ever think maybe this town isn’t big enough for two of these things?” was Sarah Fenske—who had previously worked at Feast and also declined an interview request. Among the others who passed or never replied to requests included each magazine’s current editor and a few former writers, who did not want to talk about rivalries or relationships or questioned why I was even writing this article in the first place. Replying to that latter question, I was not sure how to answer.)
Sauce, I was told by insiders, was for more serious foodies. The magazine was appreciative but skeptical of local spots and even the city they served—a “town that likes to ladle out dressing like a soup kitchen.” One Sauce critic noted that, while an appetizer of “oysters were plump, tender and served piping hot,” the “deep bowl of seafood chowder with crawfish, shrimp and fish in a white wine and tomato broth was daunting in appearance—made worse by the miniscule spoon provided to eat it with.” The fish was “off,” the shrimp weren’t deveined (“which some people don’t mind; I do”), and the staff were “figuratively clumsy and seemed completely detached from their job.” Still, Sauce praised the restaurant’s ambience, beef tenderloin, and Brandy Alexander.
At the turn of its first decade, when Neville left the magazine, Sauce was still producing steady content (one restaurant’s coleslaw was “quite good despite coming from a tub”), but was filling some of its own ad space with self-promotions; advertising had started to go elsewhere—either to Feast or the internet or away from journalism altogether. From time to time, though, I would still find a new issue of both magazines spread open on the dining room table.
Sauce, I was told by insiders, was for more serious foodies. The magazine was appreciative but skeptical of local spots and even the city they served—a “town that likes to ladle out dressing like a soup kitchen.”
“We were champions of the dining scene, but not in a way that kowtowed to the people that we covered,” Ligaya Figueras, a former Sauce editor, told me. After writing for Sauce, Figueras became the food and dining editor at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution; now she has a slight Georgian twang in her voice. She thought the stories Sauce told, the way the magazine told them, and the photography that complemented them were all “frankly superior” to Feast. When she became the executive editor of Sauce, Figueras tried to include a story or a recipe in each of her letters from the editor. “You didn’t get that from Feast except for when Cat started to copy what we did,” she said, “I mean, it was just fluff.”
Searching for another scoop from a longtime local food journalist, I called George Mahe, the dining editor of St. Louis Magazine since 2006. When he picked up, he was in a bad way: His back was hurting, he was in traffic, and he did not feel like himself. He was worried about offending his colleagues, but he was also trying to be helpful. He kindly recalled that when Mace and Neville broke up and went their separate ways, the food journalism scene reached a point of “oversaturation.” The two food magazines, the city daily, the alt-weekly, the city magazine, and all the other smaller suburban papers were “stepping on each other’s toes,” struggling to break news about openings and closings, fighting for the same story the other publications would inevitably tell. Mahe remembered that in the 2010s, “we were all dogs running after the same bone.” He said nervously, “Ultimately, I think there was way more supply than was needed. And I think that’s finally coming… Things are changing a little bit.”
Things did change, but perhaps not for the better. Nationwide, the journalism industry started to crumble. The printed word could not compete with information on the internet. Advertisers pulled away; conglomerates kept making cuts. The local magazines were hollowed out, transformed into skeleton crews of editors and designers, while the writing was increasingly outsourced to a loose web of freelance contributors. Some food journalists stayed, bouncing between the existing local outlets or even going down south to Georgia; others went off to corporate posts or deeper inside the food industry. Then the pandemic hit, and all the food writers left had to reckon with a world without restaurants.
At the height of the lockdown, Sauce and Feast both wrote about restaurants’ resilience, adaptation, and take-out offerings. Before Covid cleared, though, Neville left Feast to work at a farm museum. And during the pandemic, a time of mourning for the local food scene, Mace changed her tone. “Our scene may not look the same on the other side of this, but,” she wrote, “we will rebuild—and we will be better for it.”
The two food magazines, the city daily, the alt-weekly, the city magazine, and all the other smaller suburban papers were “stepping on each other’s toes,” struggling to break news about openings and closings, fighting for the same story the other publications would inevitably tell.
George Mahe—on the phone in his car with his aching back—reluctantly said that because of the pandemic, “the hard hitting critiques went by the wayside and the articles became a lot more informational than they were critical.” The nuance and criticism that had distinguished Sauce from Feast was deemed improper for the times. The magazine offered to run free advertisements for struggling restaurants, and by the time they reopened, food journalists were just happy to have them back. After Covid, restaurant criticism had been completely killed.
As Mace moved what was left of Sauce online, she announced, “As we enter 2023, the winds of change are calling, and we hear them loud and clear.” Later that year, several staffers were laid off, and as Neville transitioned to another job in communications, Mace sold Sauce to a publishing company. “I think it’s sad to lose another local publication,” said one Sauce editor who had recently resigned at the time—and who cited worsening finances as the reason for the sale. “I think to lose a voice like that is bad for the culture of our city, and I’m really going to miss it.” At the time, the Sauce was actually still publishing online, but the editor’s eulogy declared that the magazine, along with its criticism, had already died.
Around this time, Feast cut its monthly issues down to quarterly magazines. The next year, the magazine scrapped its print issues altogether. Its parent company also gutted the local printing press (72 workers were laid off) and looked to outsource printing of the daily Post-Dispatch. Meanwhile, the company that bought Sauce would sell the alt-weekly Riverfront Times to a sole buyer who now runs reviews of amateur porn and weed. Today, George Mahe told me, food journalists “all continue to jockey for position in the new normal.”
In that “new normal,” the skeleton crews at Feast and Sauce compete with influencers who can film food content for an audience of thousands. Like most local publications, the food magazines now have little presence and enjoy little success. Today, both Feast and Sauce publish virtually the same short restaurant news, interviews, recommendations, and listicles.
The nuance and criticism that had distinguished Sauce from Feast was deemed improper for the times. The magazine offered to run free advertisements for struggling restaurants, and by the time they reopened, food journalists were just happy to have them back. After Covid, restaurant criticism had been completely killed.
When I asked local chefs, managers, and restaurateurs to tell me about today’s food journalism scene, they told me that each magazine publishes different articles and has a different voice—but not one was able to offer any specifics on their uniqueness, their purposes, or any hope for them in the future. One prominent chef who has been covered by both Feast and Sauce replied, “I’m not saying that there isn’t a differentiation there,” then paused, “but I can’t tell you what it is.” Another local chef told me that each magazine had sent interns to interview her, and that they took pictures of the restaurant’s food with their smartphones. “I don’t really know what they’re doing,” she said with a sigh.
Then, George Mahe told me a story: The white haired, round faced, cherub-looking editor filmed a social media reel to promote a dining podcast for St. Louis Magazine. He and his co-host were talking about pies, and at the end of the thirty-second video, Mahe had a pan of cream smushed in his face. He later found out, through social media analytics, that most people never made it to the end—that his pied face was forsaken in favor of nine seconds of their attention spans. I felt sorry for him, especially when a popular St. Louis food influencer told me that in the business, creators really only have two seconds to stop people from scrolling. (“If you’re lucky, you’ve got three seconds.”) In this attention economy, people are turning to short, flashy videos for their restaurant news and recommendations, and Feast and Sauce share shadows of their former relevancies.
The food influencer (who has tens of thousands of social media followers but wanted to remain anonymous to preserve a working relationship with both publications) said that Sauce and Feast “need to do something,” because both of their boats “are kind of uh… sinking.” The influencer suggested that maybe Sauce and Feast could join forces, maybe one could buy the other, or maybe they could both switch to catering to readers and viewers with shortened attention spans. “I would just tell them,” the advice went, “‘You have to meet people where they are.’”
Mahe was hesitant about the rise of food influencers. “For some people, seeing a few pretty pictures and reading, ‘This was delicious’ and ‘That was delicious’ is enough. It shouldn’t be,” he said. “I think diners would be better served getting their restaurant recs from informed or trained sources rather than an individual with a smartphone and a self-serving agenda.” Figueras, the former Sauce editor with the Southern drawl, said a restaurant review “doesn’t just take three minutes in front of a camera after having gotten paid for something and eating something and just saying fluff.” She admitted she might sound “old-guard snotty,” but said that what influencers do and what the food magazines are still trying to do “are not apples to apples.”
One prominent chef who has been covered by both Feast and Sauce replied, “I’m not saying that there isn’t a differentiation there,” then paused, “but I can’t tell you what it is.”
Some people (though not many) still read the recommendations and restaurant guides that Sauce and Feast put out. And it may be hard to come by in this city, but in the cracks of the journalism industry, readers can still find restaurant criticism… somewhere. Earlier this year at the Post-Dispatch, writer Ian Froeb was disappointed by Gordan Ramsay’s downtown restaurant: The duck was overcooked, the herb aioli was tasteless, and the tuna was “saltier than the ocean from which it was plucked.” In all, Froeb pronounced Ramsay’s Kitchen a “spectacular failure.”
Froeb declined to be interviewed for this piece, because Feast and the Post-Dispatch share the same owner, Lee Enterprises (which is still shedding jobs and revenue, and just moved printing of the city daily 120 miles away). But if he had agreed to talk with me, I would have asked him if somewhere in that restaurant review, there was at least a drying, crusting, critical splatter of Sauce.
