So the search function here sucks but nothing came up when I searched.
NYTimes Wrote:
After an improbable rise as a chef who took a tiny noodle shop in New York and parlayed it into a kind of punk rock culinary movement and five wildly successful restaurants, David Chang seemed destined to become a television star. Now famous and ubiquitous, he would be a natural to join the legions of knife-wielding, apron-wearing stars who terrorize amateur cooks for the benefit of an audience. Either that or he could look into the camera and patiently explain how you too could make food that would knock people out of their chairs.
Lucky Peach, a new food magazine co-created by the owner of Momofuku, breaks many of the conventions of magazine journalism...a quarterly magazine that weighs in at 174 pages with nary an ad in sight and a price of $10.
It breaks many of the conventions not only of food journalism, but of magazine journalism in general as well. The glamorous star on the cover? It’s a chicken being lowered into a pot with its wrinkly backside depicted squirting out graphic eggs. The so-called front of the book — which in most magazines is filled with infographics and breezy snippets — is filled with a trippy, 9,000-word, rambling eat-a-logue through Japan by Mr. Meehan and Mr. Chang.
And while most food magazines use tiny recipes and glossy photos to expose readers to as many cuisines as possible, Lucky Peach is planning single-themed issues. Some of the graphics look as if they were conjured in a tattoo parlor — rugged, expressive and streetwise, with a gallery of the pantheon of ramen heroes rendered in black-and-white woodcut.
The magazine is printed on thick matte paper, not glossy, and mixes the divine — an essay on authenticity by Todd Kliman — with the profane — an alcohol-infused verbal fistfight among Mr. Chang, Anthony Bourdain of “No Reservations” television fame and Wylie Dufresne, chef of WD-50, on the subject of mediocrity, each piece pivoting around food and cooking.
In between are page after page of material about ramen — the central theme of the issue — in the form of recipes, regional Japanese maps of different varieties and a taste test of noodles by, do tell, Ms. Reichl.
The writing in Lucky Peach is bright and unexpected, the graphics are remarkable, and the knitting of images and prose is done with élan.
That makes sense: Mr. Chang is a freak about the covenant of quality between the consumer and the cook, and McSweeney’s, the small publishing concern put together by the writer Dave Eggers, is similarly concerned with handcrafted excellence in the form of McSweeney’s Quarterly and Believer magazine.
“The solution to problems in publishing is probably not less, but more,” said Mr. Ying of McSweeney’s, who is the editor of Lucky Peach. “Writers and designers don’t deserve to have their work squeezed onto pages that look and feel like tissue paper. We wanted to put the effort in to give the reader something they’d value having in their hands.”
Lucky Peach delivers. It is a glorious, improbable artifact that sold out its first printing of 40,000 and second of 12,000. It is a pint-size hit among the food-obsessed.
Now, I would not know a good bowl of ramen if you prepared it in my mouth, but there I was, carrying this magazine around for a week — to the beach, to the restaurant, to the office. Mine is now decorated with bookmarks, food stains and beach sand because I could not put it down. Mr. Chang said Lucky Peach was less a business idea than something that sprang from the spaces between like-minded people.
Mr. Bourdain, a chef who took off the apron and headed out into the world with a camera trailing him for the Travel Channel, agreed. “The guiding ethic was that the important movers in the project cared less about the business success than making something that is good and interesting,” he said.
The iPad app has been slow in coming, but there are bits visible on the Web, including a video of a hilarious profane noodle throw-down between Mr. Chang and the twin magicians of Torrisi Italian Specialties, Mario Carbone and Rich Torrisi. But for now, Lucky Peach is something you dog-ear, not activate, with your fingers.
For years, publishers have stamped out mass-produced glossies sold at deep discounts so that they could build an audience to sell advertising against. That formula has been breaking down; audiences have atomized, ad dollars have dispersed and information has become a widespread commodity.
At some point, publishers are going to have to seduce audiences into paying real money for the product. Lucky Peach is not only something to behold, it is also something to hold, a reminder of print's true wingspan.
I've been curious about it since I first read about it and finally found it at a newstand today. I thumbed through it and looks to be really well done. I didn't buy this issue because I'm just not that interested in ramen but I can definitely see myself really liking it when the issue theme is more in line with my own food interests. Anyone actually read it?
