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"Food & Wine" is a classic doctor's office magazine, particularly if that doctor is a plastic surgeon. The target audience is clearly affluent, but the advice and articles work for most anyone.

The magazine offers a wide-ranging, monthly look at several topics: home; travel; restaurant overviews; general cooking info with recipes and tips on quick meal prep; healthy eating/lifestyle; and a few wine-related articles, including food pairings and an insights into wine types and varietals.

The layout of the magazine is easy on the eyes. The design (photography and text) is in keeping with other magazine of this genre; in short, it is high-quality, but not groundbreaking. For the visually-challenged, though, the font size selection is definitely on the small side. As for the writing, it is neither better or worse than the competition. At between 100 and 120 pages, "Food & Wine" is perhaps a bit skimpy page-wise, but still average for the cover price. And while there are many ads for upper crust products, the magazine wisely clusters them in such a way that articles are less broken up over scattered pages than some other magazines - a nice touch.

The recipes reflect the current trends - multi-ethnic, Puck-ish, and with a bent for unusual pairings of ingredients. But to their credit, a simple scan of the recipes shows few of the bizarre, impossible-to-find ingredients that are the bread and butter of some other gourmet magazines.

Good magazine for a decent price that makes it worthwhile for even us "commoners".

the most over-rated food magazine

I subscribed to Food & Wine for a while and was continuously disappointed. The articles are on the superficial side and more importantly a lot of the recipes and product reviews are not as well researched as they should have been. I experienced more than one flop trying their stuff. The magazine tries very hard to be trendy and pick up the latest and greatest in the cooking and restaurant scene without being careful enough in deciding what is actually an important or meaningful trend rather than a fad. This magazine can't hold a candle to "Bon Appetit" or "Gourmet".

A Trendy Disappointment

Maybe I was just hoping for too much from one magazine - a good wine magazine with some recipies thrown in. The recipies are good, but the wine secion is a sparse and unsophisticated afterthought. The articles are truly grating, focusing in agonizing detail on the trendy parties thrown by the editors' friends. There is a place for a magazine like this, but don't let the name fool you; this publication is really more of an entertainment lifestyle magazine than a food magazine. What is most definitley is NOT is a wine magazine.