Pitching Guide

Issue 2, and everything else we're commissioning this year

Good morning and welcome to Vittles. Today, we’re sharing an updated pitching guide for everything we’re doing across the publication this year, both online and in print. We kindly ask that this pitching guide is not shared or linked to in pitching guide aggregators — we are a small team and we are often overwhelmed by the number of pitches we receive when this happens, and it often means we cannot fulfil our aim of answering every pitch individually.

Issue 1 of our magazine is now back in stock and you can order through our website here. If you would like to stock it at your shop or restaurant, please order via our distributor Antenne Books by emailing maxine@antennebooks.com and mia@antennebooks.com

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Issue 2: Bad Food

Thank you so much for the support you have shown us over the last few weeks – we’ve been overwhelmed by the response to Issue 1 of our print magazine, and its success has enabled us to greenlight our second print issue. While Issue 1 served as a five-year-anniversary best-of, all future editions will be based around a loose theme, starting with Issue 2: ‘Bad Food’. 

We encourage writers to interpret this theme as they wish. On a literal level, ‘bad food’ could refer to food that is poisonous or could be bad for our health: think, food that has been corrupted by pesticides, the science of E numbers, or the question of whether rice is safe to reheat. Or it could refer to food that is considered by people in food media to be in ‘bad taste’, like disorderly Italian food in India, surprising angles about absurd fast food chains and the things they come up with, or the proliferation of food-replacement drinks like Huel. Or to the question of whether certain foods like MSG or Maggi are bad, to critics who love to savage bad restaurants, to the food produced in toxic restaurant kitchens, or the cursed aesthetics of contemporary UK dining establishments. Or it could be none of these things, but something with a sense of absurdity, fun, anxiety or an interesting conflict/dilemma at its centre. We are equally interested in so-called ‘bad’ ways of eating and also the weird, the gross, the decaying, the perverse, the banal – Doomsday stockpiling, cannibalism, all the usual stuff – things that defy established ideas of virtue and goodness in food. As for all Vittles pieces, we need ideas to expand into intriguing stories, arguments or analysis. We are not looking for stories to simply introduce a specific dish or phenomenon.

The deadline for pitches is Friday 30th May. If you would like to pitch, please send an email to vittlespitches@gmail.com marked ‘Issue 2’ – we intend to reply to all pitches by the end of June. Articles will be commissioned at our usual rate, which is to say £800 upwards for long, reported features of around 2000–2500 words, £300–600 for recipes and short features, and around 40p a word otherwise.

Issue 2 of Vittles will be published in November/December 2025. 

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Newsletter

While we commission Issue 2, it’s a good time to remind everyone that we are always open to pitches for the Monday slot of the online newsletter. These are some of the themes that we’re prioritising this year.:

• Investigative reported work, particularly on the subject of food production and distribution. We are looking for critically minded food journalism that involves deep reporting over a long period of time. Some examples of investigative work in Vittles or by Vittles editors include this piece by Sharanya Deepak on vegetarianism as a tool for punishment in India, this long-read by David Jesudason on curry house awards, and this account of delivery worker strikes in the UK by Callum Cant.

• Essays that uncover the story behind a phenomenon or aspect of modern food culture: We particularly love essays that, by focusing on one thing, reveal something surprising about how food culture spreads. Some particular favourites include this essay by Tim Anderson on how katsu curry became a British phenomenon, Digby Warde-Aldam’s look at how the design of Pizza Express changed British restaurants, and Kasia Tomasiewicz and Marta Zboralska’s cultural history of the polski sklep. 

• Scams and feuds: So much of modern food culture is absurd, and driven by spite, ego and sometimes outright fraudulence. If there is a story with scams and feuds right at the heart of it then please pitch it to us. The more shenanigans the better.

• Food writing that holds particular resonance in the backdrop of rising fascism in Britain, concentrating on neighbourhoods or communities which have been unfairly demonised or underreported on. We are particularly looking for essays by writers embedded in these neighbourhoods and who have a stake in these communities. We especially want these pieces to engage critically with why something is being written about, rather than just ‘discovery writing’, which only aims to humanise certain communities through their cuisine or hospitality.

• South Asian writing: We are looking for interrogative, critical, reported features from South Asia that think about the political and social forces that influence food cultures in the subcontinent, labour in the kitchen, and also fun, dynamic stories about how people actually eat. (We are less interested in why a certain dish or cuisine is delicious, or about how your grandmother cooked.) 

• Smart and sharp critiques of online food culture – the biggest driver of how food is changing today – and the consequences of the traditional-to-social media shift. 

• Essays and polemics about the British hospitality industry written by people in the industry (and for other people in the industry). If you’re a chef, front-of-house worker, KP, restaurant owner, producer, supplier or distributor and you have something you want to write about the industry that you can’t think of a home for, then please get in touch. Essays can be written anonymously if preferred.

We particularly encourage writers who don’t consider themselves food writers to pitch, because we’re especially interested in ideas that can invigorate the often-staid ways that food is written about.

To pitch for the newsletter, please send us an email with PITCH in the heading to vittlespitches@gmail.com. We aim to reply to every single email, although due to the high volume of pitches, it can take up to six weeks for us to get back. Articles are commissioned at our usual rate of £500-800, depending on word count.

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Vittles Restaurants

Finally, we are in the middle of commissioning some special projects at Vittles Restaurants. Without giving too much away, we are currently looking for short capsule writing on the following subjects:

• Chinese restaurants in Oxford, Cambridge, Newcastle, and smaller British cities. If you know of anywhere doing something special, that could hold its own against any Chinatown restaurant, then let us know.

• Lunchtime food options in the vicinity of Farringdon, Holborn, Covent Garden, Bloomsbury, The City, Liverpool Street, Spitalfields, and Shoreditch.

• Informed and offbeat restaurant and food recommendations for Paris, both inside and outside the Boulevard Périphérique, which might not normally be included on a Paris guide.

We also welcome restaurant recommendation pitches for our regular Six of One feature. We want your short-form recommendations for your favourite restaurant, food truck, stall, takeaway, lunch counter. The places we want to know about are the places you think are great but which you feel deserve more recognition – places that have a story. We pay £100 for every recommendation. To pitch an idea for any restaurant feature, email Adam Coghlan at vittlesrestaurants@gmail.com.

If you have any questions then do feel free to leave a comment below!