Vogue From the Archives: Jeffrey Steingarten on Gourmet Doggy Dining

From: Vogue Nostalgia - Sunday Aug 17, 2025 11:00 am

Plus more from the Vogue Archive

By Chloe Malle

Tomorrow morning, our second-annual installment of Dogue launches with seven celebrity Dogue covers and a litter of additional stories that we can’t wait to share with you. In anticipation, we bring you a few of our favorite canine moments in Vogue, including inimitable food writer Jeffrey Steingarten’s 1998 foray into gourmet doggy dining for his golden retriever, Sky King. If the first line doesn’t hook you—“‘A fat bitch,’ I announced, licking the juice of a wood-grilled lamb sausage from my fingers, ‘Is never an easy welper’”—the recipe for roasted bone marrow surely will. (He was reading from the breeding manual for retrievers.)

Steingarten was ahead of his time. Nearly 30 years later, it is almost looked down upon to feed a high-class Dogue mere kibble. (I recently had a friend gasp when I told them my St. Bernard mix, Lloyd, eats dry food rather than refrigerated, human-grade fare.) Indeed, there is now an entire industry devoted to high-end pet food.

Steingarten, an early adopter, consulted none other than Jean-Georges Vongerichten, who, it turns out, cut his teeth as a teenage apprentice at an inn in Strasbourg by preparing the canine meals on Sunday evening family night, when upwards of 20 chiens would join their human companions at the restaurant. (The pressure was high, he recalls, because the dogs’ dinners had to be ready at the same moment as the main course.) Daniel Boulud, for his part, advises that dogs should always eat cooked meat, so as not to encourage chasing after live animals—though one could also take inspiration from the story’s image: an Irving Penn and Phyllis Posnick still-life of a Milk-Bone covered in caviar and crème fraîche. Bone appetit!