The Oral History of the Launch of Epicurious

When we launched two decades ago, the Internet was still a tiny, painfully slow place. It even had a different name.

It was the Information Superhighway then, and there were only 23,000 websites on it, including early versions of Amazon.com, eBay.com (then called AuctionBay), and Yahoo (known as "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web"). The best way to discover new sites was to buy an "Internet phonebook," which was printed on real paper and sold in real bookstores. Users connected over phone lines and prayed no one picked up the receiver. Images took forever to load and site designs were ugly and idiosyncratic — wild heirloom varietals that paved the way for today's mass market fare.

Back in 1995, we were the first recipe website. (Or close enough.) One minute, there were no recipes online. And then there were. Suddenly, anyone who could figure out how to connect to the Internet could have access to thousands of the best recipes and food writing the world had to offer.

Being old has its advantages. Epicurious was first — or among the first — at a lot of things. We built the first recipe box, advanced recipe search engine, printable recipe, user-generated recipe, food community, and email-to-a-friend functionality. We did e-commerce and streaming video and mobile applications long before these things were common.

But at the beginning, we started with a little HTML and a lot of blind faith. This is the improbable story of the people who made it happen and how they got it done.

THE INTERNET BEFORE THE INTERNET

Rochelle Udell, founder and president of CondéNet: We had all heard about new media. We knew that we needed to learn this stuff because we all felt this was going to be in our future. We didn't know how.

Jeff Jarvis, president of Advance.net: There was much debate about what platform to build on. Would we be on the open web or a walled garden? There was no guarantee that the web was going to win over these big companies. In fact, a lot of them, like The New York Times, started on AOL. But Steve Newhouse [chairman of Advance Publications, parent of Condé Nast] went with the open world. We started on the web.

Dan Kohn, founder NetMarket, technical contractor for launch: The Internet was legitimately the Wild West. What do you mean nobody owns it? What do you mean that there's nobody in charge? It was a very challenging concept for a lot of folks.

Rochelle Udell: I live in a historic neighborhood. When I take the fourth graders on a tour and I say to them, "Imagine this place a hundred years ago. There's no cars, there are no roads, there's no electricity, there are no bathrooms, now, let's begin." That is exactly where we were twenty years ago.

Jeff Jarvis: There was almost no access to the Internet. It was impossible. It was like it just didn't exist.

Dan Kohn: Getting on the Internet was hard. If you had a Windows machine, you had to go to an FTP site in Australia and download this free piece of software called Trumpet Winsock that could speak TCP/IP so that they could communicate. Then you'd install the browser on top of it. It was like ten steps.

Melinda Anderson, intern: Back then, not everyone had computers. In 1994, there was one computer for the entire fashion department at Allure. One.

Jeff Jarvis: Yahoo thought they could catalog the web forever. That they'll hire some people, and they'll find all the best, what's new, and they'll do a daily list of everything there is on the Internet. I love the wonderful, quaint hubris of that.

Joan Feeney, editor in chief: I remember a lot of the sites out there being either exploding grapes, or porn, or totally creepy.

THE BIRTH OF THE IDEA

Rochelle Udell: The idea for Epicurious came from a Thanksgiving dinner I was cooking. This was 1994. I was making two turkeys — I had one in the oven and one in the grill because I had so many people coming. I was afraid the other turkey would never get done. AOL had something called the "Talk Turkey Hotline." I went on at about six in the morning. I posted the question, "It's 21 degrees in my backyard. I have to put a turkey into the grill. What do I need to know?" It was unbelievable. I got almost a dozen responses instantly. I realized, "Oh my God, we are really onto something here." It also happened to have been one of the best turkeys I ever made in my life.

Jeff Jarvis: Part of the founding myth of Epicurious was the interactivity and the community. It had some utility, had beauty, had voice to it.

Rochelle Udell: Condé didn't know whether this was going to work or not work so they didn't want to use gourmet.com or bonappetit.com. So, I made up the name Epicurious, from "epicure" and "curious." I wanted it to be a destination. Its own brand.

Jeff Jarvis: Only if it was independent could it really find its own potential and find what it ought to be. Starting a brand sent that message. This is not just a marketing site. This is something new. That really freed up Rochelle and Joan to invent pretty wildly.

Rochelle Udell: The magazine model has revenue coming in two ways, subscriber money and advertising. There was no subscriber money here, so we needed to get some advertising. We had no idea. There were advertisers that used to tell us, "What am I getting for this? Nothing. Bubkis."

Joan Feeney: I remember going to car advertisers and explaining it. We got push back. One car advertiser's marketing study told them that the most popular hobby among their car owners was gardening. I think they bought gardening.com or something, and the thought was, "We're going to do this gardening website, and everyone is going to come and they're going to buy our cars and we don't need you now."

THE TEAM FORMS

Rochelle Udell: We were given a small budget for staff. We were given a space on 45th Street. Then it was a matter of pulling parts and pieces together. I needed somebody who could manage editorial while I was running around the world and learning things.

Joan Feeney: I was employee number one. Once I came on board, I remember her telling me, "You have to hurry before they kill us."

Paul Tedesco, web developer: Rochelle was the mama bear. Somebody who fought for the whole thing. But Joan was the glue behind it all. She was delivering where the next steps were, what needed to happen.

Jeff Jarvis: I was the one guy who went across both newspapers and magazines at Condé. I was Steve [Newhouse's] guy. I would translate his desires to the room and report back to him on what was what. I was trying to help, but basically, I was an interloper.

Joan Feeney: I needed people who had an eagerness to do something new. Hiring was tricky — and I fell for this a few times — people thought Epicurious was the farm team to get into magazines. Those people were awful, because they wanted to be print people.

Penelope Green, senior editor: Joan called me and said, "We've started this thing." I drove in from Rhode Island and met Rochelle. She was speaking in a completely differently language. None of it made any sense, but she was intoxicating. I said yes to whatever it was that they were offering. They didn't even seem to know what they were offering.

John House, senior editor: My outlook was pretty utopian. In the corniest possible way, I thought it was the future — of print publications and a lot else. By then I'd been online for a few years. Friends were talking up the WELL. I was on Mindvox via modem. I'd swapped mixtapes and spent time IRL with people I'd met online.

Wendell Lansford, director of technology: I had a small internet consulting company before joining Condé. It was called Internet Consulting Corporation, I kid you not. We held seminars around the New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia area. We were getting forty, fifty people in a room paying us $500 and that would lead to consultant projects. One of our attendees in that process was a guy named Jeff Jarvis.

Jeff Jarvis: I brought over various people to get trained in HTML. That's where the relationship with Wendell started. Then he became our guru.

Wendell Lansford: It was originally me. Then I brought on board a handful of people. I don't remember the exact number. I had a strong developer. A strong database person. And a sysadmin. Oh wow. That term isn't used any longer. System administrator. They took care of the servers.

Paul Tedesco, web developer: I had launched one of the first internet magazines at Trinity College, which we published on hypercard stacks in like, '93 or '94. I was hired as a web developer. It was a made up title. I was coding. I was doing HTML. HTML back then was like, "Wow, you know how to do that?!"

Mark Michaelson, art director: I worked with Joan at Entertainment Weekly. She called me up and wondered if I was interested in designing for the Internet. At that point, I had never been online. I said, "I don't really know anything about computers," and she said, "It doesn't matter. You're a designer."

Kevin Slavin: I think Mark Michaelson had been fired from every single magazine in New York City. They said he threw a fire extinguisher at the editor of Newsweek.

Mark Michaelson: It's a crazy story. At Newsweek, we closed on Friday nights. The bosses all went out to dinner between like 8 and 10 and everything ground to a halt. Nothing could move forward. So the rest of the staff would go out to dinner during those times, too, and there was a lot of drinking. When they got back to work everybody from the editor-in-chief down to the mailroom, everybody would be shit-faced drunk. It was my last night. I had been fired and was finishing my last issue. The whole art and photo department took me out and there was a big party, a whole lot of drinking and carrying on, and then we got back to the office. Things got a little wild. There was a fire extinguisher right outside my office and somehow, somebody pulled the pin and squeezed the trigger. It went off, and there was white powder everywhere. I think New York magazine reported that I had attacked the editor-in-chief with the fire extinguisher, but this is not what happened.

Kevin Slavin: I came to work for Epicurious because I was interested in Mark. But he wasn't really interested in me or anybody else. I don't think he really dug Epicurious at the beginning.

Mark Michaelson: I had art directed for magazines. I had worked at Entertainment Weekly. The Village Voice. High Times. I was an ink and paper guy, and I still am. I think I'm the first former website designer in history, because I don't think anybody ever designed for the web and then stopped designing for the web. Ever.

Melinda Anderson: I told HR I wanted to intern at Epicurious. They were perplexed. I think most of the young labor always is requesting, "I want to work at at Vogue." There was zero competition. They were like, "Sure, you can go work in that weird division's special project."

Gail Horwood, senior editor, later editor in chief: When I left to go to Epicurious, I had print editors telling me I was throwing away my career. I was making a huge mistake. Digital was considered, for many years after that, the backwater of publishing. It was someplace that you went when you didn't know what to do. An off ramp. I thought it was an on ramp.

Penelope Green: I would call up food writers and say, "Nobody's going to see it. We have no money. And I can't really explain it." I wasn't paying attention and I didn't care. I was a bad worker. Joan eventually said to me, "You're not here. You have to go." I said, "I know, I'm sorry." I never made it to launch. I was there maybe three months.

Joan Feeney: I love Penelope. She's supremely talented. But she was miserable.

THE TROUBLE WITH TECHNOLOGY

Paul Tedesco: We had a radio connection to Condé's main office up the street for internet access. It went through the window.

Joan Feeney: A secretary sat next to whatever the machine was and she had a plant there. She would open the blinds and put the plant in front of the sun. When she would move her plant, she would block the signal, and we would lose the Internet connection.

Rochelle Udell: When we finally figured it out, we called over. "Move the plant! Move the plant!"

Joan Feeney: Our servers were housed in a closet in Jersey City. There was a dentist on the same floor and they had bad wiring. They would often lose power because their tools were blowing the circuit. Then the dental hygienist would go in and flip the circuit breaker and we would lose everything.

Jeff Jarvis: It's a rat trap of a building. I'm sure there were old democrats buried in the walls. We served everything there. It was a small room. And very hot. The air conditioning didn't work. I'd hired this head of technology. One time, the room was getting very hot, so he turned off the screens for the servers. Instead, he turned off the servers. Yes, it was like Spinal Tap. Run the servers up to 11.

Joan Feeney: We lost everything right before we launched and we didn't have a backup server. Wendell found a group in Minnesota who would only try to recover the disk. But they wouldn't even look at it unless we sent $10,000. I put it on my credit card. I put it on my expense account. So, I got a call from HR. They thought this "recovery" in Minnesota was Hazelton. They thought I had checked myself into rehab and charged the company.

Paul Tedesco: We were doing a Halloween story. My job was to silhouette a thousand pieces of candy. In Photoshop 2. I would do everything by hand with a lasso. I spent days on end just silhouetting, silhouetting. Then one day, I remember watching my files just disappearing off the server, watching them go. Everybody starts panicking. "What's happening?" It was like tick, tick, tick… Nobody knew what to do. Kevin just reached over and pulled the plug out of the wall to stop it. It all was lost. All the artwork. We had no control. We felt like slaves to this little box that didn't want to cooperate. And it controlled everything.

Wendell Lansford: There were no well defined architectures for how you build a scalable site. We had no idea what the traffic volumes were going to be, if our architecture and our servers were going to be able to handle it.

Gail Horwood: There was no content management system. Period. There were flat HTML files, organized in hierarchy. It was ridiculous how bespoke, and crafted, and handmade that site was.

Joan Feeney: I used to say it was like making an apple pie. Only you had to plant the apples and grow the wheat. Everything we did, if we didn't do it first, it was so close to first, that it didn't matter. We would've stolen ideas, systems, people if we could've. We would've adopted best practices if there were any.

Wendell Lansford: I remember building everything from the ground up. There were no frameworks to follow. We wrote our own forums. We built a chat room. Things like the recipe box, that was a nice little software application that leveraged what was possible at the time. I remember Joan and Rochelle describing a world where you've got a small computer in the kitchen, and you're pulling up your recipes from your recipe box right there while you're cooking or whatever.

Mark Michaelson: Wendell was a genius, and at that time, he seemed to me like a total astronaut. He knew so much about this world that was so new, and he was so young. How does somebody so young get so smart so fast?

Wendell Lansford: We built email-to-a-friend functionality. Things like that came naturally. Hey, we've got somebody reading something, we want to get more people to the site — let's make it easy to share the content. Was I the very first person in the world to do it? I don't know.

Gail Horwood: There were just a lot of cool firsts, but it was all based on, how are we going to surprise and delight these people interacting with our brand?

DESIGNING IN THE STONE AGE

Joan Feeney: Rochelle initially hired a small boutique firm, because they had a full team already in place. I did not think I could do what she wanted with this crew. They were too slick, they were too soulless. I started chipping away as soon as I could.

Penelope Green: I can remember being in five-hour meetings with whatever this ad team is and them saying, "You're going to be clicking on the cheesecake," and I'm thinking to myself, "What are they saying to me? I do not understand what it means to click on the cheesecake." I couldn't grok that fundamental thing, which of course was the key to everything. The hyperlinked clicking on the cheesecake is going to take you somewhere, and it was the paradigm of the future, and I could not understand it.

Mark Michaelson: At that point, I thought, "You have a homepage. What else is there?" To get the architecture through my head, Kevin would spread big pieces of white paper on the ground and crawl around drawing and saying, "This goes to here, and then you have to go back to here. From every page, you need to be able to do this and this."

Kevin Slavin: Mark wasn't designing by looking at the web. He was basically designing a tabloid, beautifully, better than anyone else could have designed a website. My role was figuring out how to translate that vision.

Mark Michaelson: It was so limited. The Internet was mostly ASCII text. An Internet designer was really like an icon designer, designing little envelopes and little symbols. I was very frustrated, because I wanted to do glorious designs. It seemed like everything we wanted to do was pushing it a little too far, and we had to pull it back.

Wendell Lansford: People had very slow connections. They were horrible browsing experiences. To put up an image, you had to buy a server, you had to know how to code, and get an internet connection. All of that, right? Today, you literally take out your phone and tap a finger, and you've shared a photo that anybody can see in the world. That's how easy it's become.

Kevin Slavin: There were no production tools, just Photoshop 2.0. I found a big book that showed the raw code of image compression algorithms in a bin in the hallway. That's when I learned exactly how .gifs and .jpeg compressions differ — .gifs get heavier every time the color shifts on the horizontal line. So big blocks of raw color were free, and anti-aliased type was incredibly heavy. The fewer color shifts in a graphic, the smaller it became.

Mark Michaelson: I think most web designers at the time were using Photoshop, but I was a QuarkXpress guy. Kevin told me that that's not a problem. "We can deal with it. We can turn the Quark pages into .gifs, and we can chop them up, and create the individual elements." So I didn't really do anything. I didn't learn any new technical things. I was just doing the stuff that I knew how to do, and it seemed okay at the time.

Kevin Slavin: I went back to Mark and said, "OK, here's how color actually works on the Internet." That conversation led to rethinking the design to become what we launched with. If you look at the pages, you'll see restricted palettes in long horizontal bands that — when assembled together — look cohesive.

Mark Michaelson: The breakthrough that he made was big .gifs took a long time to load, so we were chopping up the gifs into little pieces, and they would load independently and assemble on the screen. That seemed like a huge breakthrough for us, because we were able to do larger images and graphics that could load relatively quickly.

THE RECIPE DATABASE

Rochelle Udell: We didn't have a magazine. The only thing we really had ownership of at that point was about 5,000 recipes, that's what we had.

Joan Feeney: We bought the content rights [from our parent company, Condé Nast] every year, for a dollar. It was like signing the Magna Carta. That's one reason we started with recipes.

Gail Horwood: When Epicurious was founded the vision was blog-like before blogs existed. It was just like a food tabloid. And I very quickly picked my niche, which was the recipe database. How are we going to digitize all these recipes and get them online and get them searchable? I worked with the monks to digitize the recipes and set up the recipe database.

Wendell Lansford: Oh yeah! The Electronic Scriptorium. That was fantastic. How do you put recipes on the Internet? Monks down in Virginia. They're educated. They've got free time. They can type well. That's what they do. They just cranked through all those recipes. That was fantastic.

Gail Horwood: They digitized for a number of publishers and had strict standards. For example they would not accept digitization work from Playboy. The recipes couldn't be scanned because in those days scanners couldn't translate all the special characters and fractions found in recipes.

Melinda Anderson: We would compile hundreds of recipes and send them off to them. We cut the recipes out of the magazine. I would photocopy that page. I would look at the photocopied page and make sure it was readable. Then I would cut the recipe out and I would tape it into the middle of a blank page, and photocopy it again. We'd had to make sure nothing else was on the page, otherwise they'd type it up, too. Like the ding bat at the end of the recipe? They'd type those up.

Gail Horwood: We were feverishly building this database with a couple of thousand recipes at launch — racing to ensure that there would be enough choices for people who searched it. And my liaison for the monks was like, "Oh, I think I forgot to mention they're going on hiatus." I'm like, "What are you talking about?" She was like, "Well they have to bake fruitcakes. That's how they make all their money." Because it was Thanksgiving, and that's what they do. They bake fruitcakes for another six weeks. So literally there was no digitizing going on, because they were off on their other job, which was baking fruitcakes.

THE LAUNCH

Rochelle Udell: I was standing next to Joan. I don't remember what I said, but we sort of looked at each other like, "Oh my God."

Melinda Anderson: I was back in college, just waiting at Skidmore hitting reload on some ancient Mac with a terrible dial-up connection. I didn't know what the stakes were. I had no idea. I was a kid. I was the youngest, I was only there for the summer, and I was an intern. But I felt a real sense of ownership.

Wendell Lansford: I think I was in the office. It was a good looking, well designed, really awesome looking website. It was glossy.

Paul Tedesco: I don't remember a party. We had already tested and done so much, I don't remember high-fiving anybody and cracking champagne.

Mark Michaelson: As far as a launch party for the public? It might have happened. I might have been there. I might have had a great time.

Jeff Jarvis: The launch was anti-climactic. There was no way to get discovered. Apart from showing up on Yahoo, you had to be recommended. People had to link to you. Until Google came, really, you didn't purposefully go in and search for things. It was just meandering. It was links. Everyone would tell stories of wasting three hours the night before going to site after site after site after site.

Joan Feeney: It's a good point. How do you throw a launch party if no one cares or knows you exist?

THE RECIPE SWAP

Joan Feeney: From the start, Rochelle always talked about the community, about being connected, about being part of a network of people who share an interest. All of those things that everyone thinks Facebook invented. She was talking about back then. She wanted Epicurious to be about connecting with people.

Jeff Jarvis: In New Jersey, we started forums [at one of the newspapers], and the high school wrestling forum took off. They grew unbelievably. Yes, we also had problems. I remember an episode about some Coach Nutgrabber and having to kill our first posts. But there was willingness, so we started something new. We started food forums.

Gail Horwood: I remember thinking we need a recipe exchange. And Joan was like, well what are we going to call it? I'm like, "The Recipe Swap!" She's like let's call it "Gail's Recipe Swap." I mean, who am I to have this named after me? But it was amazing, the way that community responded to the ability to share recipes. They created their own language. They had a shorthand.

Joan Feeney: People would type up ISO, for in search of. Like, "ISO my grandmother's apple strudel, she lived in Ohio in 1890, does anyone have it." Twenty people would respond immediately and type up elaborate recipes. This was Rochelle's vision come to life.

Gail Horwood: They quickly segmented into regional groups. There were like the "Seven Roses of Texas" and they would go have dinner parties. Complete strangers — and this preceded online dating — formed dinner supper clubs and were eating out all over the country. The message boards became hyper-local. People were meeting each other.

Joan Feeney: People got married. There were weddings, parties.

Jeff Jarvis: They took over. They held us hostage. One time, the technology wasn't working well, and they threatened to leave us for Alaska Airlines' chat room until we fixed things up.

Mark Michaelson: I didn't really have an understanding of the size of the audience until Gail's recipe swap, when there started to be a community developing, and people were actually interacting with the site and leaving recipes, and talking about other people's recipes.

Wendell Lansford: Gail's Recipe Swap was taking down our servers. That showed me that there could be reader generated content in addition to editorial produced content. To this day, I think those trends are still playing out.

BACK TO THE FUTURE

Rochelle Udell: We were first, so that is an enormous advantage. And look at the culture of food. In the last twenty years, food has become a huge cultural interest.

John House: ​Building the site around a broad but specific topic — rather than trying to extend a single magazine title — was a stroke of brilliance. Food is in the sweet spot between practical service journalism and ​enormous potential for social activity.

Jeff Jarvis: Joan and Rochelle and Steve Newhouse and company understood utility and value. Back then, everybody was looking at the same sites, and there was not much else to look at. A lot of it was non-commercial. A lot of it was academic. A lot of it was ugly as sin. But Epicurious was immediately beautiful and useful. It was true to Condé Nast.

Paul Tedesco: For me it's the trust factor. I know that the recipes are going to be solid and not going to be some made up thing that's missing half the stuff and looks nothing like the pretty photograph.

Melinda Anderson: It feels monumental now. But it felt very personal at the time. A lot of being evangelical was not just for Epicurious — it was for the web itself. It was trying to explain to people why the web was so great. And in that web we were a tiny pocket corner of it, and in that tiny pocket corner, I was this tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny speck of dust.

Rochelle Udell: I think the secret to so much of the success is that there were really no expectations. And because there were really no expectations it's all opportunity.

Kevin Slavin: It wasn't as hard back then. You didn't have to think about mobile. You didn't have to think about various server configurations. It was all held together with duct tape anyway.

Mark Michaelson: Kevin and I were like the Wright brothers, and we made this rickety little thing that managed to float for a few seconds, and then all of a sudden now they're walking on the moon. I think back about how simple and crude and basic it was. History is like that.

Rochelle Udell: I knew we were a success when I went to my butcher. And I stood next to a woman and she said, "I got this recipe from Epicurious. I have to have this specific cut of meat."

Editor's Note: Portions of this interview have been condensed or edited for clarity. A deep thank you to the people who participated in this article, providing source materials, and lending their time. Apologies to anyone who may have been unable to be included in this oral history. Special thanks to the early crew: Anastasia Pleasant, David Villeger, Paula Watson, Deanna Brown, Stephen Pascal, Sarah Parr Gire, Katie Hottinger, Roseanne Lufrano, Tanya Steele, Marcy MacDonald, Betsy Beckman, Stephen Orr, Pilar Guzman, and, of course, Steven Newhouse. Your contributions are felt, even today.