Vittles: Five Years And A First Issue

Photography by Jessica Wang

In a sense Vittles Magazine began as a lockdown endeavour. On furlough from his job managing Postcard Teas shop, Jonathan Nunn decided to launch a Substack, to expand upon the food writing that he had already been doing for the likes of Eater. Launching as it did in a moment when restaurants the world over were shuttered, from its very inception Vittles was a space for writing about food that wasn’t strictly restaurant coverage. A platform both for Nunn’s writing and for that of a series of commissioned writers (both established and emerging), Vittles quickly found an audience for its expansive, roving approach to London’s food culture, and for the way in which Nunn and its other writers used food as a lens through which to explore themes like identity, belonging and class.

Now in its fifth year, and with a reported 84,000 subscribers, Vittles continues to evolve and grow, with its first print issue released this past month. A hybrid that includes some of the highlights of its past five years alongside brand new commissions, it celebrates what the magazine has achieved so far, while continuing to push into new, unexpected realms. Fittingly, given its origins in blog culture, in part the inspiration to launch a print magazine came from a fanzine that a reader sent Nunn, of a selection of her favourite articles. Also fittingly, given Vittles’ strong sense of community with its writers, editors and illustrators, from a round of prints Nunn was considering running last Christmas: “We were thinking about selling prints by one of our illustrators for Christmas. She sent in a set of three, and one of them was a soft serve. The initial drawing that she sent was so good that it reminded us of a New Yorker cover. We thought, ‘Well what if this is the cover of a magazine?’”

Here Nunn discusses why print feels countercultural, the evolution of Vittles and his journey into food writing.

Now, print feels like a counter cultural thing to do

Why did you decide to publish a print magazine?

It had been on my mind since we started, almost. I think what we were trying to do from the outset was not the form of a Substack – it was using Substack to essentially start a magazine, even if that magazine was online. Normally Substack functions as a blog, one-to-one speaking to your audience, and when we started it was kind of a hybrid. It was me introducing an article by a writer who had pitched, and that piece of writing would have undergone various stages of editing, and artwork would have been commissioned too, all like a magazine. So we were essentially doing everything that a magazine does for a while, even if that was in a modern format that didn't really exist up until five or six years ago.

When we had to decide on the domain name for the Substack, I thought Vittles Magazine would be good to have. One, because we already saw ourselves as a magazine. And two, just in case we did make the leap to print. So it had been in the back of my mind for a while. But then I have also seen some publications expand very quickly, take on print because of the prestige of print, and it can be tricky if it’s not properly budgeted, because it's so much more expensive than running an online operation.

We're very much in conversation with things that have gone before us

It’s sometimes said that Vittles fills a space in food media that didn’t exist before. Do you feel that you're disruptive?

I think when we started we were disruptive in terms of what was out there at the time, within food media. As time has gone on though, more and more I feel that we're a continuation of quite a lot of things that have gone on within British food media, going back to the 1970s and 1980s Evening Standard, Jonathan Meades in The Times, Fay Maschler, Guy Dimond’s editorship of Time Out in the 2000s. I mean, it is different because back then it was fairly privileged white people writing about these things, but they were also privileged white people with a very interesting perspective, who were great and curious writers, which I would take over some of the alternatives. So there is a disruptive element to what we do, but we're very much in conversation with things that have gone before us within British media.

As a project Vittles has now been running for five years. How do you feel about the way it’s evolved, and the influence it now has?

In many ways it's been baffling to me, because I've not planned any of this and things have happened off the cuff, and then evolved in a way that I hadn't really expected. I think the first big change in how we functioned was taking on new editors. I know what I’m good at and I know what I’m bad at, and I am very much a prisoner of my own sensibility. Having Rebecca May Johnson and Sharanya Deepak, and later on Adam Coghlan and Odhran O'Donoghue, has opened up the possibilities of what Vittles can be. For instance I don’t think I would have done reviews if it wasn't for Adam coming on after Eater London closed, and then feeling that we could take on some of the mantle of what Eater had been doing; not being exactly like it, but having a more restaurant-focused vertical within the publication. I don't think we would have had as much of the literary sensibility as we do without Rebecca, Sharanya and Odhran being editors.

I've been interested by Vittles’ popularity and success in terms especially of, say, a younger male reader, someone who has perhaps bought into a ‘Vittles culture’, and will make a point of going somewhere that has been recommended. It’s almost like they can perpetuate a hype that you’d perhaps be critical of.

It's funny, because our audience now generally skews female and and women of colour, but this was especially true at the beginning. It has changed over time, as Vittles has become less associated with my writing, but the people earlier on who were most vocal about it, sometimes to the point of being insufferable, were white men.

It's actually one of the reasons that I have slowly withdrawn from social media and being in the public eye, because I do think there is a strong parasocial relationship that people, and particularly men, have with my writing. I would rather people read my writing because they like the writing, as opposed to feeling as though they need to be going to this specific restaurant in order to be in an in-crowd, which is not at all interesting to me. I'd almost prefer people read my writing about a restaurant or a recommendation, and that then inspires them to do something similar where they live.

And you can have a kind of accidental influence which can cause a big, new run of people at certain establishments.

It’s a problem that I'm very aware of, and I do not write about a place without having to think about that question a lot, particularly in terms of the very old and the very new. With the very old, you are suddenly bringing a new influx to a restaurant, and the very new, because you can create a huge amount of hype, whether they deserve it or not, which can be difficult to keep up with if they haven't got their systems down.

For example, the last review that I wrote is of a very new place, a beautiful hidden space in a basement, and I think it's the type of restaurant that could easily be described, especially in an Instagram reel or a TikTok, as a hidden gem. I think it's irresponsible to write about that. I tried to, in the review, temper my enthusiasm with a bit of criticism as well. But also you have to, increasingly, as much as explaining who this restaurant is for, your role is to explain who it's not for, as well. Because everyone has such different desires when it comes to restaurants, it's about managing those things too. I think that a good review, by the end of it you should have worked out whether this place is for you or not, regardless of whether the critic thinks it is good.

This first issue of the magazine has both ‘greatest hits’ pieces from the Substack, as well as totally new articles. In terms of putting the magazine together, how did you decide what to include in terms of what already existed, and what to commission newly?

We started off thinking that it was five years of Vittles in March, and that we'd like to honour that in some way. So one of the first conversations we had was: “Should this be a ‘best of’?” It wasn't really intellectually interesting to any of us to just put out an anthology of what we had done before. But also, we did want to publish some of what we have done for the last five years, and show how the magazine has evolved. So it became this hybrid; half of it is some of our best published stuff, and half of it is completely new work.

I think that each of the editors of the magazine has a piece in this first issue that means something to us. Strangely enough, not many of the new pieces were commissioned specifically for the magazine. It was this thing where lots of pieces happened luckily at the same time, and we realised, “Oh! This is a magazine piece.” That’s very different to how we will operate for the second issue, for which I think everything will be newly commissioned for that specific magazine.

Everything I know about restaurants I learnt from tea

What do you think made you so interested in food in the first place?

I don't think there's much in my upbringing that would make food a natural subject for what I do. Although, I am one of three siblings and we have all gone into food in different ways – one is a chef, and the other is concentrated on the holistic aspects of food, like nutrition – so there must have been something.

My mum is from Goa via East Africa, so we grew up with Goan food. My mum was one step removed from Goa herself and I think because we come from a Catholic family, there wasn't much other than food to make us feel different to any other white British person; there wasn't a mosque or temple to go to, we didn’t listen to much Indian music. So food became, I guess, the primary way to engage with that part of our identity. Obviously that can go too far, sometimes, when food is the only way you can engage with anything, with culture.

Part of it also, I think, was having a particularly bad time at university outside of London, and coming back to London and really wanting to get to know it again. So I spent a lot of time in my early twenties walking around aimlessly, semi-depressed and eating. That's when I learnt how to eat, and how to navigate London as well.

Then I spent ten years in tea, which I increasingly feel was preparation for me starting to write about food, because I was constantly thinking about tea as both a cultural and agricultural object. Everything I know about restaurants I learnt from tea. So I think all those three things together.

Vittles, at the time, was a crash course in writing

How did you begin writing about food?

In my mid-twenties I was starting to think more and more about writing, but I had no outlet for it. For a long time I thought, ‘I can't become a writer, my degree was in maths, I have no examples of any writing to give anyone.’ So I just never applied for anything, and even when Eater London opened, I thought, ‘Great, I'd love to write for something like this, but I have nothing to give.’ At the same time, I was writing a lot on Twitter, and one day a writer, George Reynolds, sent me a message along the lines of: “Have you ever thought about writing about food? It seems that you like it a lot.” He was looking for new writers for this series Eater was doing called, “Five To Try”, where you had to find restaurants outside of zone one. I’m incredibly indebted to him.

My first piece was a small capsule on a Cypriot restaurant that I used to go to as a child. Adam, the editor, loved it, and he said, “What do you want to write about that’s longer?” I wrote about Green Lanes the next week, and it kind of took off from there. That was 2018, so I was kind of writing on my lunch break. It was only in 2020, when I was furloughed, that I could actually sit down and think, ‘What do I want to write about? Especially, what do I want to write about that isn't restaurants?’ Because there weren't any restaurants open at the time either.

So Vittles, at the time, was a crash course in writing really, because it pushed me out of my comfort zone. Those very early Vittles articles were, for me, about finding my voice as a writer. I mean, lots of them are terrible, but it forced me to write, because I couldn't send out the newsletter until it was done. It was a very useful exercise.

what food writing was missing was not prose stylists

Is that why Vittles has the policy of asking for writing from non-writers?

It definitely is. I just strongly felt that what food writing was missing was not prose stylists, it was anyone with a point of view that hasn't been covered 100 times already within food media. Everything else you can learn and edit in, but you cannot teach someone to have a point of view, and to say something interesting. I do think technical ability in writing is very overrated, sometimes, in that respect.