Just as books became a status symbol among supermodels and young Hollywood, a deeper interest in food is fashionable among young aesthetes. The pandemic made home chefs of us all, The Bear “yes, chef”-ified the internet, and in the space of just a few years everybody seems to have become a natural wine scholar.
This shift has spawned a new era of food media. On one hand, we’ve seen the rise of microcelebrity Instagram chefs like Alison Roman, Andy Baraghani and Molly Baz; with niche newsletters engaging in thoughtful, critical food writing finding broad audiences. On the other hand, restaurants cook up caviar-drenched dishes designed for TikTok virality and the most grotesque recipes become ubiquitous online.
But a new crop of obscure indie magazines is pioneering a print renaissance, using food as a kaleidoscopic lens through which to examine shifts in society, history, culture, and art. Bored with what they perceive to be a stale media scene obsessed with star chefs and trendy restaurants, the creators of these titles are intellectually rigorous, visually daring, and expansive in their coverage. They honour the unsung heroes shaping how and what we eat, explore the peripheries of food culture, and highlight food’s connective power.
Here, we speak with the editors of five new food publications coming out of London, Berlin, New York, and Toronto about fantasy dinner parties, trending fruit and local restaurant tips.
SLOP, London
SLOP is a boldly designed, whimsically titled magazine about produce and ingredients – and decidedly not about restaurants or chefs – launched in 2023 by former style editor Jack Stanley and butcher Nicolas Payne-Baader.
How did SLOP come to be?
Jack Stanley: A few years ago, Nicolas was working at a very cool new butcher when a very cool new wine bar opened up down the road. He noticed that every newspaper, every magazine wrote about the wine bar and he thought, you know, who talks about the butchers or greengrocers? We developed it from there. But it’s also driven by a wider dissatisfaction with food media in general. Reviewing restaurants is not really what we’re about. There’s also something about the same group of people writing about the same group of restaurants… it’s like in any industry, they’re not always picked on merit.
So what does SLOP focus on?
JS: Producers and the people who make ingredients — whether that’s farmers or cheesemongers or butchers. We have a constant argument between ourselves about where we draw the line in terms of what even is produce, but currently we’re featuring everything from wine and baked goods, right down to regenerative farming or a butcher doing something really interesting.
What were the design considerations?
JS: A lot of magazines look very similar but we’re bright orange and called SLOP. And it’s free! A big thing for us is proving that things don’t have to be bad because they’re free.
What food trends are you noticing right now?
JS: There are definitely a few ingredients that seem to be appearing on more and more menus. I feel like persimmons are everywhere at the moment.
Give us your top London food tips.
JS: The legendary Panzer’s, the new fishmonger Oeno Maris and South London bakery Toad. They all offer something different, showcase amazing ingredients and encapsulate what SLOP is all about.
Family Style, New York
Each issue of Joshua Glass’ new quarterly, Family Style – launching in 2024 – will be divided into the three parts of a “fantasy dinner party”: Aperitivo, Dinner Service, Something Sweet. The magazine covers food at the intersection of fashion, art, and culture with heavy-hitter contributors like Sophia Roe, Emilia Petrarca and Stefano Tonchi.
Why launch a print magazine about food right now?
The thing is, we’re not really a food magazine. We use food as a conduit to look at culture, but we’re really a fashion, art and design magazine. I love food’s ability to transverse culture, language and identity politics. We try to focus on things that can transverse to countries of origins or metropolitan locales, with a focus on people. Thanks to a lot of amazing artists, social media, and the fact that we were forced to face food differently ourselves, it’s allowed culturally for a unique moment right now.
Tell us more about that moment.
I think the general public’s perception of food has changed in the last 10 years. And I think a lot of that is rooted in the pandemic, but it happened before that too. I think people were just afraid to engage with food.
What can we expect from the first issue of Family Style?
I describe each issue as a fantasy dinner party. Across every issue we approach the theme as you would the theme of a dinner party – it pervades the entire thing. Everyone featured inside responds to that in different ways. The first issue theme is expatriates, so some of the people we’re featuring are literal expatriates – people who are living in a different place from where they were born – and some are more conceptual expatriates, artists who have changed their practice. Our first issue is really an unbelievable reunion of people that changed my career, but also really changed the way we engage with media.
Famous For My Dinner Parties, Berlin
Famous For My Dinner Parties is a Berlin-based online outlet turned annual print magazine that explores social, political and cultural shifts through food — like pie as protest or the role of housework and domesticity in society. The three editors Junshen Wu, Sandra von Mayer-Myrtenhain and Yannic Moeken named it after a line from Shelley Duvall’s character in Robert Altman’s 3 Women.
Why launch print in 2023?
Junshen Wu: We love print. I believe everybody who is working in online publishing has a dream of holding a magazine in their hand.
What was the big idea behind FFMDP?
Yannic Moeken: We’re friends and we would always talk about food. But we wanted to do something that wasn’t necessarily about cooking or recipes or the foodie dream of perfect food. We were more interested in what food tells us about ourselves, about our cultures, and the ways in which we can use food as a medium or lens to tell bigger stories.
What kinds of stories?
Junshen Wu: I think Famous for My Dinner Parties is like the food version of a fashion magazine. The same way fashion talks about a lot of other things through the medium of clothes, we want to tackle a lot of different topics in our lives and in our society through the lens of food. It’s not necessarily just about cooking and eating.
YM: Food is biology and ecology, but it also connects us and divides us. We’re always interested in literature and film and art. And food is a really big part of popular culture, and is playing a bigger role.
What’s your favourite story from the first print issue?
YM: There’s a Belgian film from 1975 called Jeanne Dielman that follows the life of a housewife throughout three days doing housework, essentially. I wrote about this film and what it says about the role of cooking and the role of housework.
Sandra von Mayer-Myrtenhain: The visuals play with these post-war, especially West German, aesthetics.
What food trends are you noticing right now?
JW: It was fun for us to be in Germany during the heyday of ‘girl dinner’ last summer, because a form of bread, cheese, cold cuts, raw vegetables and fruit has been the most traditional evening meal here for generations. It’s literally called ‘Abendbrot’ — or evening bread. German TikTok was very confused that grandma’s dinner was promoted as something new and fresh.
Give us your top Berlin food tips.
JW: We really love the restaurant UUU, where Yuhang Wu takes inspiration from the Chinese cuisines she grew up with and has come up with beautiful dishes that feel completely new, fresh and exciting, while also rooted in an ancient tradition.
Serviette, Toronto
A biannual-ish magazine from Max Meighan – owner of the Toronto restaurant and brewery Avling – that covers food circularity and the people and producers changing how we eat. It was launched in 2022.
How did Serviette come to be?
With the restaurant, Avling, I always wanted to do a newsletter and liked the idea of creating a “best of” list at the end of the year in print, along with some original stories and deeper dives behind what we were doing. So that grew into something different. The more I worked on it, the more I realised that food, if you take a step back and look at it quite broadly, really does intersect with nearly every aspect of our lives. That was something I wanted to explore in greater depth and on an ongoing basis, so Serviette was born.
What’s the magazine’s mission? What does it cover?
It covers arts and culture, design, architecture, urbanism, ideas, all through a food and drink lens. Its mission, particularly in the local Canadian context, is to help drive conversations around food and food culture forward. Internationally, it’s about connecting people who are passionate about food and who see food as almost a sacred pursuit but aren’t in kitchens or don’t own restaurants.
What’s your favourite story you’ve run?
In our first issue, we spoke to an American chef who lives and works in Copenhagen, and the thrust of the piece was about how and why a Michelin-starred chef decided to open a brewery and the parallels that he saw between brewing and fine dining. It was a conversation about ideas, a conversation about circularity, a conversation about the intersection of high food culture, timeless technique, and really accessible food culture.
Chutney, Toronto & London
A sporadically published and sometimes risograph printed magazine, Chutney tells visually arresting stories of identity, politics and culture, divided into three sections based on the steps of chutney preparation: Chop, Mix and Preserve. It was founded by designer and writer Osman Bari in 2019.
Tell us about the name.
The name Chutney is inspired by this phrase that my mom used to say to me quite a bit when I was younger. I’m originally from Pakistan and there’s this classic quote that parents say to their kids, which translates to “don’t make chutney with my brain”. It’s something that they say to you when you’re annoying them. But I think I was just inspired by the fact that chutney could warrant its own sort of cultural idiom and play this role within culture and language and identity that supersedes just being a food.
Also the story of chutney as a food itself, being this humble condiment that then has subsequently been colonised, and you can find it in hundreds of different varieties around the world now.
What’s the focus?
The focus is on stories on culture and identity, primarily through underrepresented voices around the world. It’s quite broad. Each issue is a combination of stories on music, food, family, colonial history, nostalgia, just a whole mix of things, which is also meant to represent the name chutney.
You’re a graphic designer. How did you establish the magazine’s visual language?
The first two issues are risograph printed. I think the printing process was really important in defining the magazine’s visuals. Riso has these really vibrant colours, and you can overlay them, and I obviously wanted it to be something celebratory, despite the content in certain cases being quite serious. It’s really about uplifting communities and just being a visually stimulating and celebratory magazine.
What food trends are you noticing right now?
Sharing seems to be in vogue — it seems like loads of places are pushing the platters, nibbles or bite-sized bits on the menus. Oh, and supper clubs!
What do you think is influencing the public’s interest in food?
The Bear certainly had an effect on me! Boiling Point too. I think there’s definitely an appeal to peeking behind the curtain and seeing what goes into the production of a meal at a restaurant.
Give us your top London food tips.
Lately I’ve been craving that classic North American neighbourhood joint, like a reliable, chequered floor, go-to pizza place or deli. To that end, Yard Sale Pizza and Bodega Rita‘s have been favourites (with some great vegan options), though the latter has sadly closed and only does the occasional pop-up, with guest chefs. And for English breakfast in a similar vibe, try Norman’s.