This March it's Food & Wine month at iSUBSCRiBE. To celebrate this week we talk to the editor of delicious. magazine, Kerrie McCallum about its inaugural design issue.
What’s so delicious about delicious.?
It's a brand people love for a reason - they fall in love with the food, the design, the stories, the photographs, the people, the travel. It's a brand that celebrates living well, living generously, coming together and that attracts people. Plus the recipes don't fail so that helps the 'delicious factor'!
March marks the inaugural design issue of delicious. How important is design in our lives?
Design is certainly important in food, as well as style, fashion, interiors, right down to everyday life. All these things interrelate like one big melting pot, and design is more democratic than ever before also. We looked at the stories and life behind the food for our Design issue, and found some really interesting stories, such as top chef Ross Lusted is influenced by Polynesian architecture when plating food, and he and his partner Sunny even design and create their own plates to showcase the food. We visited design guru Neale Whittaker at home to see how he entertains (his partner David Novak-Piper is a former chef and creates fantastic food!). Neale was actually the founding editor-in-chief of delicious., and given he had just joined our company to look after Vogue Living, this felt appropriate for the Design issue also.
How did the issue come about?
Food and design are just completely interlinked - even in the home, you hear people embracing the craze for 'plating up' or how they set the table when they entertain has become more important. There is also an increasing focus on restaurant fitouts and design, or how people put together their kitchens and the appliances they choose. The more we brainstormed the more we felt there were interesting design stories to tell around food and restaurants as well as travel. It also helped cement our positioning as a premium food/lifestyle brand.
delicious. includes contributions from many famous chefs, this month features Jamie Oliver, also Ross Lusted from The Bridge Room - what do chef’s recipes reveal about their personalities?
I guess to be successful they have great attention to detail! It's funny, some chefs look and seem so different to the types of food/recipes they create and aren't necessarily what you expect at all. Which is exciting and surprising. One of the things I enjoy most about working with our contributors or different chefs is that many of them have fantastic or unique personalities - they are not boring, or scripted and I like that!
In this issue, Food Director Valli Little creates a romantic date night menu and Martin Teplitzky pays tribute to his mother Gretta Anna with a cookbook of his own. Is love the key to good food?
Yes, I think food IS love! Or a gesture of love. It's intertwined with being nurturing, nostalgia, memories,creativity, technique as well as for me being something therapeutic yet practical at the same time. It can be something very simple or incredibly elaborate, it can be what you make it.
What do you love most about contemporary food culture in Australia?
It's varied, it's creative, we are hungry to learn and experiment, we are not set in our ways, we embrace the new, and there are some great new personalities emerging. It's why we launched the Next Gen reader dinner series, profiling six of the hottest upcoming chefs in this country, to tell the reader why we think these are the people to watch out for in the next year. We invite the readers to join us for dinner to experience some of the most innovative meals in the country right now.
Do you have a desert island dish?
Cheese. The end.
What’s the best part of being the editor of delicious.? The worst part?
I eat and drink too much. And I eat and drink too much.
Can you give us a sneak peak of what’s ahead in future issues?
I think you will see more contributors be introduced, and exciting personalities emerge. Hopefully there will be even more creativity in how we approach new flavours, foods and even the way we shoot. We've launched new pages as of the March issue, like peaking inside the home of chefs and foodies to see how they entertain, added more travel, more insider news, plus introduced new contributors such as Matt Moran, Silvia Collocha, Matt Wilkinson, Anthony Huckstep and Mike Bennie. We want to try new things, introduce new experiences for our readers to participate in, find interesting stories behind the food, and excite and inspire the readers to come with us.
How important are subscribers to the magazine? Why subscribe?
delicious. has one of the biggest subscriber bases in the country, and a loyal devoted audience. One of the reasons you NEED to subscribe to delicious. is so you can get into our events first! Our reader dinners are notorious for selling out (via subscribers) before the issue even hits the newsstands. So subscribers get first dibs on everything, so that sounds like a pretty good reason to me!
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Photo of Kerrie McCallum thanks to Jordan Graham