Vittles Magazine: Issue 1
Our first print magazine, now available to pre-order.
Vittles — Issue 1 — Spring 2025
A magazine about modern food and culture
With the talented contributions of:
David Jesudason, Sanam Maher, Aaron Timms, Fay Maschler, Yvonne Maxwell, Tunde Wey, Jonathan Meades, Anita Le Roy, Paul Gilroy, Jenny Linford, Nigel Slater, Tom Lamont, Guy Dimond, Jasleen Kaur, K Biswas, Samanth Subramanian, Eliza Clark, Julia Armfield, Nick Bramham, Sophie Mackintosh, The Croydon Young Archivists, Amy Key, Angela Hui, Tim Anderson, Waithera Sebatindira, Huw Lemmey, Sharanya Deepak, Robin Craig, Ana Kinsella, Rebecca May Johnson, Adam Coghlan, Jonathan Nunn, Ruby Tandoh, Vijeta Kumar, Jenny Lau, James Unson, Gabrielle de la Puente, Melissa Thompson, Steven Young, Tommy Corns, Jonathan Swain, Richard Scott, Yasmin Jaunbocus, Elainea Emmott, Jessica Beckitt, Rose Dymock, Tom Whyman, Sing Yun Lee, Michaël Protin, Noorulain Ali, Alex Christian, Samia Singh, Alex Brenchley, Klaussie Williams, Olivia Twist, Ben McMahon, Antoine Cossé
and Luke O’Reilly.
Vittles: Issue 1 will be published in May 2025. Pre-order here.
I started Vittles as an online newsletter five years ago this week, which just shows you how far spite, and the mitigating factor of a global pandemic, can take you. It would be too grand to say I had a five-year plan, or that I knew what I was doing at all, but after a few days of taking pitches it became clear that so many of you wanted to write about food in your own way, and that an even greater number of you wanted to read about it. Given the strange circumstances, I thought that a flexible and responsive newsletter might be the easiest way to platform as many people as possible before regular life came hurtling back; in another era, I thought, maybe I would have started a small zine.
In those five years, Vittles has exceeded even my most outlandish expectations of what it could be. We have grown into an editorial team – now made up of Sharanya Deepak, Rebecca May Johnson, Adam Coghlan, Odhran O’Donoghue and me. We have platformed over 500 writers and illustrators, many of whom had never written about food before, or had never written professionally at all. We’ve published memoirs, profiles, investigations, polemics, poetry, short stories, short films, guides and lists, and we’ve even found time for some recipes and restaurant reviews. If there’s one thing I hope we’ve shown, it’s that ‘food writing’ isn’t really a genre, but an amalgam of many different things that just happen to be related to food (and often, not really about food at all).
To mark Vittles’ fifth birthday, we have taken our second leap of faith and made a magazine. We want print to become a permanent part of our future. So much of culture now – food media and Vittles included – is mediated through screens and owned by massive tech companies. As much as this has lowered the barrier of entry, it’s always struck us as slightly perverse that lovingly crafted essays and illustrations arrive in your inboxes alongside work requests and spam, to be read in a state of stress between other emails. In starting a magazine we want to make the case for a slower, more considered form of consumption. Plus, magazines are fun! We’re excited to join the wealth of independent food magazines already in the UK and attempt to reach the high water mark that our favourite (and sadly departed) American food publications, Gourmet and Lucky Peach, made in the 2000s and 2010s. And, more importantly, to write our name in italics.
‘Fun’ was our watchword when compiling Issue 1. Food can be many serious things in disguise – class, economics, migration – but it is also absurd, a testament to the extreme lengths to which humans have gone in order to make things delicious. Issue 1, therefore, is filled with charlatans, hustlers, frauds, arguments and gossip. It opens with the most entertaining piece we’ve ever published: David Jesudason’s barnstormer of an investigation into the organisations that run Britain’s various curry awards — a long-read so full of animosity (and uncles) that it also wins the dubious honour of being the first essay we’ve had to fully legal. In a dispatch from Karachi, the great Sanam Maher has written about the family who first brought sushi, kicking and screaming, to Pakistan, dispelling the myth that South Asian food is all about tradition and your grandmother’s time-honoured recipes. Meanwhile, Aaron Timms, our finest critic of the absurdities of modern food culture, sends a scathing report from New York on the exploits of four of our ludicrous privately-educated exports – the food influencers Eating with Tod, Jolly, Topjaw, and Thomas Straker – and their attempts to crack America.
Although Vittles editors reside in locations as far-flung as Delhi and Harwich, we are, at heart, a London publication that quite likes London (and Londoners). No one knows more about the city’s restaurants than Fay Maschler, and we’re delighted to have her in conversation with Adam Coghlan for a historic, long-ranging interview all about 1987, the pivotal year in Modern British dining. At the other end of the spectrum, we’re equally honoured to have a compilation of new food writing from eight young people from Croydon’s Young Archivist project, who may well be the critics of the future. Between this, we have contributions from some of our favourite writers – including Jonathan Meades, Tom Lamont, Jasleen Kaur, Paul Gilroy and Nigel Slater – plus a lively (read: heated) conversation between Yvonne Maxwell and Tunde Wey on the subject of gatekeeping restaurants.
And there’s more: the ultimate dinner party recipe from Nick Bramham; a short story from author Sophie Mackintosh; and a beautiful photo essay on London supermarkets by our photographer Michaël Protin. Plus! Puzzle pages, games, a score-settling guide to food-world beef, some new writing from me, including the most personal thing I’ve ever written, a permanent space for Rebecca’s essay ‘I Dream of Canteens’, and a baker’s dozen of our favourite pieces we’ve published over the last half-decade. All in all, around 160 pages and 60,000 words of what we consider to be our very best work, old and new.
A magazine is a collaborative project, and we have been lucky enough to work with Dan Biddulph, whose playful design has transformed words on a screen into a real magazine. If the magazine looks beautiful then that is down to Sing Yun Lee’s stunning cover illustration of infinitely extruding soft serve, and a legion of brilliant illustrators and photographers. Sophie Whitehead’s sub-editorial work has once again improved everything that it touches. That it exists at all is thanks to Ruby Tandoh, whose unpaid labour has dogsbodied it into reality.
And, of course, thank you to our writers and readers. We hope that over the last five years, and in the pages of this magazine, we have shown that food can be written about by anyone, and that it is for everyone, too. Jonathan Nunn
A note on pre-orders and prints
This magazine is entirely self-published and funded only through user subscriptions. We have taken on no additional investment, and it contains no adverts. Pre-orders are vital so that we can gauge the demand and print the right number of copies. If you pre-order the magazine by April 25th the magazine will cost £18, down from the RRP of £20. Paid subscribers will get a further reduction to £16 – there’s a discount code after the paywall.
For the time being, we are only fulfilling orders within the UK and to the US, but we will be working with distributors to make the magazine available internationally. If you are a retailer and wish to stock Issue 1, then please email us at vittlespitches@gmail.com.
We have also released new prints by Sing Yun Lee and Michaël Protin which were commissioned especially for the magazine. You can find them here. If you buy a print and a magazine, the print will be sent immediately and the magazine will arrive later.
