Food for Thought

Max Meighen: I’d always been drawn to restaurants—the theatre of them. I was fortunate to work in some phenomenal kitchens in Toronto, Montréal and London in the United Kingdom. But I wanted to understand [the industry] on a bigger scale, so I moved on and worked as a butcher, briefly became a brewer and bounced around different aspects of the food and hospitality industry—everything except serving, funnily enough.

Nicola Hamilton: There’s still time.

MM: That’s true. All of that culminated in opening a restaurant in the summer of 2019. It was multi-faceted; it was a restaurant and a brewery, and we had a rooftop farm. We had a great seven-month run, and then the world came to a screeching halt. That’s where the beginnings of Serviette came from.

NH: I’m a graphic designer, trained in editorial and magazine design. I was rethinking what it meant for me to be a magazine designer and what the magazine scene in Canada needed. I was able to open Issues Magazine Shop, a clubhouse for print lovers and independent media, in July 2022, a couple of months after the first issue of Serviette landed. That’s how we met, through Issues and Serviette.

MM: I wanted to stay connected to that world of ideas and was drawn to magazines and their tactile, interdisciplinary approach to experiences on the page. I was fascinated by food as a vehicle for ideas and a way to enact change.

NH: And print is my first love. In an age of digital everything, print is a change of pace and cuts through the noise. A print magazine offers a unique tactile experience. It acts as both a storytelling vessel and a memento of time.

MM: Certainly, the cadence of publishing has slowed down, which matches an elevation of quality and production value. I’m very considerate about the pace of our publication schedule and the relevance of the pieces we cover.

I originally conceived of the magazine as more of an arts-and-culture, design and urbanism publication that looks at those issues through a food-and-drink lens. It is undeniably a food magazine, but it’s for people with a creative bent, interested in the big picture, hidden themes and nuances behind a subject rather than the latest restaurant opening.

NH: We start every issue with a theme. We build a call for submissions, and it goes out to the public, and we also send it to people we want to work with. Then Max has the wonderful task of sifting through an inbox of 100 to 150 submissions.

MM: We were closer to 180 for this past issue.

NH: Calls for submissions have been valuable to Serviette because all three of us [Hamilton, Meighen and editorial director Caitlin Stall-Paquet] are rooted here in Canada. We get people coming at the themes from so many different angles. We get story pitches we would have never known existed or had access to.

MM: Not just different geographies but different communities that we might be aware of but don’t have personal connections to. We want to ensure a broad variety of voices and experiences are portrayed in the magazine.

NH: What’s it like sifting through that inbox?

MM: It’s both exciting and overwhelming. That’s when the issue starts to take shape. It’s daunting because people have put time and effort into their pitches, and I want to give all the good ones a careful read. There’s a lot of great stuff out there, and we pride ourselves on putting together a unique and fun product.

NH: My favourite story was in issue four, themed “Food Is Absurd.” It was a tale of two potatoes. Anna Cafolla, a U.K.-based news editor at Vogue, pitched us this story about Mr. Tayto, a six-foot-tall plushy potato representing two potato chip companies separated by the Irish border. It was a story of Ireland’s duelling potato chip mascots and the complexity of Irish identity.

MM: One of my favourite stories was about a writer returning to her country of birth in the Middle East and remarking how everything she loved there would be illegal in Canada because of food-safety laws. I really appreciated how it went one layer deeper with the theme “Food Is Consumption.” (Also, it shared my fury for red tape.)

NH: That’s probably true of all our favourite stories: They interpret the theme in an interesting way. In this upcoming issue, “Food Is Design,” we have a story about the first-ever mushroom-picking robot and another about the politics of piping, untangling the relationship between buttercream cake decorating and feminism.

Because our team is small, [the design of each issue] is a pretty intuitive [process]. I have a bookmarked folder of illustrators and photographers that I open at the commissioning stage to see what sort of pairings we can pull together. You’re trying to match up a story idea with the right contributor and playing with the mix of the whole issue.

We purposely leave it open to moments of kismet along the way. For example, I messed up our page count this issue and found out we had four extra pages. I went back to our pitches, and there was a great photo pitch that fit, and it hadn’t been published anywhere yet.

MM: I remember you commenting after working on your first issue, “I’ve never had so much room before; this magazine has so much room to breathe.”

NH: Acres of room. It’s a real joy to make. I won’t say that it’s not work, but it’s always so much fun. Did you think of pacing [the magazine as a meal] when you were building Serviette in the beginning?

MM: It wasn’t deliberate, but it’s very apt [the analogy]. When you first got involved, I remember you commented that the magazine had a uniform pacing and you brought to the table the concept of a front-of-book. Now there’s a lighter introduction that’s more playful, that we can take some bigger swings with…

NH: I guess we can’t say it wasn’t totally deliberate, because we did name our front-of-book “Starters.”

MM: Then we get into the more substantial part of the issue, where we consider balance, composition and relation to theme. And then we finish with something slightly off-kilter and playful. Some people even go straight to that back page—I’m thinking of The New Yorker’s caption contest—like it’s dessert.

Editor’s notes:

* Issue 6 of Serviette, themed “Food Is Design,” is available at Issues Magazine Shop in Toronto and at serviettemag.com, where you can find additional stockists.