Former COI pastry chef Nick Muncy’s food magazine Toothache, one of a new breed of chef-driven publications, is out now. The magazine aims to put out two issues a year — all without the assistance, or hindrance, of editors and media execs.
Toothache’s first issue features 80 recipes from chefs including such SF luminaries as Carrie and Rupert Blease (Lord Stanley) and Val Cantu (Californios). The design and layout are Muncy’s own, and while he’s no stranger to creating visually striking items, he did have some Adobe suite skills to learn before transferring his sensibilities from the plate to the page.
Even as insider-y, food-focused publications like Lucky Peach go under, a crop of others have risen up. In San Francisco, for example, Heirloom Cafe proprietor Matt Strauss announced a quarterly industry magazine called Kitchen Work, with longform stories from chefs.
“I had been talking about [the magazine] with friends, usually at the bars after service,” Muncy remembers. “Once I left [COI], I thought I’ll never have this kind of time again, so I decided to go for it — thinking it would be a lot easier than it was.”
After plenty of trial and error, he’s happy with the results, which are available for purchase online and at San Francisco stores like Omnivore Books and The Human Condition. But home cooks beware: This one’s for the pros. All recipe measurements are given in grams, for example — no tablespoons here.
Muncy says he isn’t assigning chefs certain topics or dishes — Instead, he’s giving them free reign and blank pages to fill with recipes, images, and whatever else they wish. By issue two, he envisions chefs might want to publish their art or poetry in the space.
Will Muncy enter the world of publishing full-time, we have to ask? He’ll wait and see what Toothache requires. But remember, this magazine is by chefs, not media professionals.