A conversation with Famous for My Dinner Parties founders Sandra von Mayer-Myrtenhain, Yannic Moeken, and Junshen Wu. Interview by Arjun Basu

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*Famous for My Dinner Parties* founders (from left): Yannic Moeken, Junshen Wu, and Sandra von Mayer-Myrtenhain

You may think a magazine called Famous for My Dinner Parties would be about food or entertaining—and I wouldn’t blame you if you did. You wouldn’t be wrong, but you also wouldn’t be right.

Taking its name from Robert Altman’s film, 3 Women, Famous for My Dinner Parties started as a pandemic-inspired digital project among three friends (Junshen Wu, Sandra von Mayer-Myrtenheim and Yannic Moeken) in Berlin and has evolved into a proper magazine and media brand, and along the way has won an engaged and broad audience far beyond Berlin. Something that continues to surprise the founders.

The magazine is slightly odd, if I’m being honest, idiosyncratic, thoroughly compelling, and undeniably beautiful. It’s also almost entirely done in house, including all the design, photography and writing. And despite this, or maybe because of it, the thing works. Whether or not this method—or lack of one—is sustainable is another question.

And just to be clear, there is not a single recipe in the magazine. Just a whole lot of ideas. This is a magazine then, editorially and conceptually, built around vibes. Fuel for a discussion, perhaps, at your next really great dinner party. Whether or not you aspire to any sort of fame.

Arjun Basu: So let’s get right to it. What is Famous for My Dinner Parties?

Jannic Moeken: We started off as a project that we really didn’t know what it would become, but it’s turned into, more straightforwardly, a magazine that comes out whenever we’re ready. So far we’ve done three issues and it’s essentially, I would say, a kind of bundle of essays with visuals. In the form of photography and illustrations for which we use food and kind of the broadest sense of the word as a lens to tell stories and to look at culture and societal issues.

Arjun Basu: Okay. Before we go on, let’s just introduce the members of the team. I think this is the first time we’ve had three people on, and it’s probably the first time that we’ve had this as a team. So if you could just introduce yourselves one at a time, that would be great.

Junshen Wu: I am Junshen and I would be in charge of most of the visuals and for example, for the latest issue, I’ve done all the photography in the issue.

Sandra von Mayer-Myrtenhain: I’m Sandra. And, as Junshen said, we develop ideas together and how we visualize the magazine, how everything comes together. But each of us has one specialty. And so Junshen, he’s the photographer and takes care of everything on the website and Instagram a lot as well.

While I’m more likely to say in a classical way, probably the managing director, I take care of the acquisition of partners we work with together. I’m trying to set up collaborations with potential partners. And then there’s Yannic.

Jannic Moeken: Yeah. That’s me. I do most of the writing for the magazine. And also we work on photo shoots together and I do a lot of the actual food bit, the food styling.

Arjun Basu: Writer and food stylist. Okay, so let’s do a little quick history of this because you didn’t start as a magazine. You started as a website. So what was the idea? Why did you start the website?

Jannic Moeken: We started this at a point in, I think, all of our lives where we were just looking for something for a project of our own, where we could bring in some of our ideas or things we were thinking about and find a way to share them with an audience.

We would just meet over dinner for a long time and talk about stuff that interested us. And over time, this idea narrowed down to the way we wanted to use food as a lens to discuss issues. And I think, yeah, at first it wasn’t really, it wasn’t like paper or a print product wasn’t really a thing we ever really thought about. We just wanted to find the easiest way to share this with people.

And the internet seemed like the way to go. And so that’s what we did. We started in February, 2020. We launched our website and our Instagram page and just started posting articles, writing essays, taking pictures, and slowly, some stuff started moving from there, but it wasn’t an avalanche of success, I would say. And it changed.

Sandra von Mayer-Myrtenhain: No, I don’t know. I wouldn’t say that it wasn’t a success. I guess it was a starting point. I think we didn’t have a clear vision, we now start and this is our target. We just had an idea that we want to tell stories through food.

And we rented a studio and we met there. We developed the ideas and I think in the beginning it was quite clear that we wanted to have different pillars that we will be an online magazine, but that we also do exhibitions and events.

Everything evolves around food. That was the idea. But then Corona hit all of us and we weren’t able to do any of the public events and invite friends around and share food and ideas. So that’s why we concentrated on the online magazine in the beginning. And it just grew very organically.

Jannic Moeken: Yeah, it was actually a reaction to the circumstances. We had plans. We wanted to express ourselves, we wanted to work, to bring our work into this world through the lens of food and through different aspects of it, like through text, through visual arts, but also through, like, offline events that we either eat together or like exhibitions about food.

But because all of that was not possible for us, but we still felt the need to create, so we kept the online platform. We just kept writing, kept photographing for two or three years, and then we thought, Oh my God, I think we’re ready to bring this to a magazine.

Arjun Basu: So did you go straight from the website to the magazine after the pandemic was over? Did you have events, did you start building that community that way, or was it online and then it went into real life and then you went into print?

Jannic Moeken: Yeah we did have events. I think what we didn’t do, which we maybe planned in the beginning, is to have actual dinner parties, which would make sense with the title. It turned out that our studio space wasn’t really suitable for hosting dinners or cooking.

Arjun Basu: So you, you weren’t famous for your dinner parties?

Jannic Moeken: No, we were not, no. That title came from when we were thinking about a title, which turns out to be pretty difficult. I re-watched a film that I really liked from the seventies. It’s a Robert Altman film called 3 Women from 1977. And then suddenly at one point in this film, the Shelley Duvall character, and it says, “I’m famous for my dinner parties.” And I liked that line a lot. And at first I thought I just wanted to make a t-shirt that said, “I’m famous for my dinner parties.”

And as we were discussing titles for the magazine, suddenly that came up. And we thought, in a weird sort of roundabout way, it could be a good title because it’s so weird and strangely long and hard to remember that it might actually be memorable because of that. Which, I don’t know if that works.

Junshen Wu: But we also have t-shirts.

Arjun Basu: Yeah, my joke for a long time has been that if it works on a t-shirt, your brand is good. The t-shirt is the ultimate test. So then, you’re having these events and you’re not famous for parties. What led to you saying, “I think we’re ready for print”? What does that mean that you’re ready for print?

Sandra von Mayer-Myrtenhain: I think we had produced so much content and so much, we felt, so much good content, and as Yannick said that maybe we didn’t reach the kind of audience we wanted to, or, and we felt like that we can extend it to print because we all love print, we all love magazines. And it just came very, very natural evolution that from all the content we had, we thought it’s time to put these on paper.

Jannic Moeken: I think also when you’re obviously an online magazine we also were dealing with Instagram and its algorithms a lot and sometimes you would make things that you felt you had just thrown them into the void and nothing really came back from it.

So we had all these things that we made and it just felt it wasn’t even necessarily maybe for the public, but just for ourselves that we wanted to give it a sort of more permanent spot where it could live on paper.

Arjun Basu: I always say that you don’t want to just live on social media because that’s rented land. You don’t own it. And they can change things up and ruin you a second. I want to read this from your first editorial because I think it says a lot about who you are and your purpose:

“Contrary to what the name would suggest, we wanted Famous for My Dinner Parties to be a place for our thoughts and ideas, for us and our friends to question, discuss, and react on societal and cultural issues through the lens of food, while also having fun creating things that please our sense of beauty and humor.”

So you had this thing on the web and then you started having friends over for parties, maybe not dinner parties. So the magazine seems like an ambitious thing where you say, “We can actually go further with our ideas.”

Junshen Wu: Yeah. Like for us it felt really organic. It felt at the time when we published the first printed magazine, we were online for three years and then sometimes we would still have the dinner parties three of us and to discuss What we want to do with this? What do we want? What do we wish for Famous for My Dinner Parties?

And then I think that year somehow it came to all of us. It’s, Oh, maybe we want to go print. Back then we’re just like, Oh, it’s just a natural decision. But I think it’s also because we’ve been doing this for three years, it feels kind of like a graduation ceremony to let all this content we’ve done in the COVID time, let them graduate. And then let’s enter high school.

And it has also something to do with—Sandra and I worked in magazines before Sandra co-founded the 032c magazine and I’ve been writing for a lot of magazines in China—and and for us it’s somehow still our passion and and we just, all of a sudden we were just, like, Let’s do it.

Sandra von Mayer-Myrtenhain: And we know how to do it. I think that’s also why it became important for us to print it, because we knew that we have the content already, we know if we get a graphic designer if we get a little bit of money together, then we can actually print it. We know how to do distribution. It just seemed like why not? Let’s do it.

Arjun Basu: That was going to be my next question and you’ve half answered it and that was what your background is. Because there’s only two types of people who get into a magazine. One, people like yourself who are experienced and know how difficult it can be, but also how rewarding and, two, people who have never done it before and know nothing about it. And so have all of you had magazine experience in the past?

Jannic Moeken: No. I didn’t. I worked as an assistant on a magazine for three months. Nothing too crazy. But yeah, it just seemed fun. Like a fun thing to do.

Arjun Basu: So you’re in the second school. So Sandra you put together your own magazine and so you had the contacts, I’m guessing on the distribution side and all that. So you were the one who said, “We can do this”?

Sandra von Mayer-Myrtenhain: It was me saying this, but I certainly knew that it’s very doable. I think a lot of people are just intimidated by the process. They don’t know how to put it together. They don’t know how to do the pricing. They don’t know how to deal with the printing process. And also especially with the distribution.

I can’t remember how we came up with the idea, Let’s do a true print version. I can’t actually remember, but it’s certainly something I knew we could easily do, you know? It’s there, it’s all there. We have everything on hand to do it, and that little bit of money we need to do printing we get as well from somewhere.

Arjun Basu: And Junshen, you said you had worked at magazines in China. Were you working on the art side or the production side or what?

Junshen Wu: I was actually a journalist.

Arjun Basu: Okay.

Junshen Wu: Yeah. So I think I started working in general when I was in Japan in a magazine called Tokyo Graffiti, and I was there as an editorial assistant. And I always loved magazines. And then it was the first time I was working there and I was like, oh, I’m just going to assist the editors.

And then in this magazine, the editors did everything. They did the photography, they did the layout, they did the sales, they did distribution. So I learned a lot from them from every aspect of making a magazine. When I was in China, I was writing for a lot of commercial magazines, mainly fashion magazines. And then I was here.

Arjun Basu: And so I should just tell our listeners that here is Germany or in Berlin, correct?

Junshen Wu: Yeah, correct. Here is Germany.

Arjun Basu: And Yannic, where are you from?

Jannic Moeken: I’m Dutch. I’m from the Netherlands.

Arjun Basu: Okay. That’s what I suspected from your accent. So Sandra’s the German here. Okay. It took me three issues to figure out that this wasn’t really a food magazine at all. The first one, it’s a food magazine. The second one is about fads, but the third one was where I realized, because it’s about food and just bad stuff. I don’t know how else to put it. you have a whole section of food and crime and food and death and food and scandal. Herring crime—which is the most Dutch thing ever—that’s where I realized it wasn’t a food magazine. So that made me reread the first two. What was the reaction to the first one? This thing comes out and it’s unique in size, in content. What was the reaction?

Sandra von Mayer-Myrtenhain: It was amazing. Because we didn’t have a lot of money, we had a digital print and the advantage of digital printing is you can just do a second edition and reprint. And that’s what we did just after three weeks.

We were sold out and we just reprinted. And we were just completely overwhelmed by all these shops everywhere in Europe and in the States ordering our magazines and direct orders, and shops and cafes and really good bookshops, and—

Junshen Wu: emails. Emails from people. Like actual readers sending emails. There are actual Shelly Duval fans reaching out to us, “Oh my God. This means so much to us!” And because this was at the time, after three years, we, of course, had some reactions from the internet. We had people reach out to us expressing their appreciation, but not like this. So we were really really overwhelmed by the reaction of releasing this magazine.

Jannic Moeken: And it was interesting because I think, at least if I speak for myself, I was under the impression that you would reach people more easily through the internet. And it turned out that I think we actually reached a lot more people through this print magazine that is living its own life in some corners of the world that we’ve never been to. And that’s really fascinating.

Arjun Basu: That is fascinating. It’s almost like a reverse of what everyone says will happen. You do the magazine and then you have the internet, and that expands your reach and amplifies your voice. Was your website “local”—more local than anything? Or were they from all over?

Sandra von Mayer-Myrtenhain: It was international. No, yeah, it was international. Also it has always been in English. It was always international. I think in a way, people who are actually going out and spending a certain amount on a print product means that they’re truly interested and they appreciate it much more than something which is maybe free on the internet.

Junshen Wu: Also probably you will have much more competition on your phone of, like, content to fight for the time of your usage on the phone than on the piece of paper.

Jannic Moeken: That’s true. What we always said is the texts are relatively long, they’re long form essays. Not crazy long, but it would still take you maybe 10–15 minutes to read them. And I think if people are scrolling on their Instagram feed and they come across a picture that maybe links to a website, which then has an article on it that will take you 50 minutes to read—that’s too much time for people to block in their morning routine.

But this sort of time that people make for a magazine that they maybe bought in a shop that they liked and then took home. It’s just a different thing. So I think also the reactions to the actual texts got a lot. We just got a lot more reactions to that aspect of it and not just the visuals.

Arjun Basu: One of the things that I thought of—and I’m happy it confirmed it with what you just said—is that and we’ll get to how you put this together, but I find the visuals are very much more, let’s just say digital friendly. But the text isn’t, the text is long, like you say, and or longish. But they are different. And in print they combine to create a very interesting book. Whereas maybe on the internet the text isn’t appreciated because the visuals are so strong. And the internet is this flat visual medium where, like you said, you’re competing with everything else. I was just thinking how does this stuff come together? Do you think of a theme at your little three person dinner parties? Do you think about, What are we going to talk about next? What’s the theme we’re doing? And then you go off and you do your thing? Or is there constant collaboration as you’re putting this together? How does it work? How do you put it together?

Junshen Wu: So I think every time it’s different. So like this, we, by now, we publish three issues. The first issue was, I think out of the three, very special in a way because of all the content in the magazines – not all of them, but most of them – are already produced.

So it existed already. So what we did is more of a process of editing to rethink, because the texts were written for the website. And then the visuals, we even shoot the visuals.

But the second one is more, like, so we want to explore the magazine's themes. So we first had the theme and then we started to think about the text, the visuals we have in our archive, and then also started reaching out to people to contribute for this specific theme.

And for the third one, we had a slightly different approach. Yannick went into some kind of like a, I would say it’s like a writing retreat. So it’s like he just gave him some time. He’s, I’m just going to write a lot of text, a lot of articles, just going to write without thinking about is there a topic, is there a specific theme? And then look at it later just to find out, oh, they are all surrounded about something, not a thing, but more like a vibe, more like a feeling.

Jannic Moeken: Yeah. I was at that point, like late last year, I was a little disillusioned about the world—

Arjun Basu: It’s a little dark.

Junshen Wu: A little, yeah. Yeah. So and then we build on that. Also the actual production is also different. So this time we kept it more closed because it's a feeling, it’s something more, it feels more internal, more intimate. We decided this time we just produce it ourselves without the contributors.

Jannic Moeken: Except for illustrations.

Junshen Wu: Except for illustration. But the next one, we have no idea how this is going to go.

Arjun Basu: Okay. So you don’t have a system. And what I think is crazy, at least to me as a writer, is that Yannick is writing almost all of the text. Just listening to you guys talk about the process—or the lack of one—do you think you will get into a rhythm? Because to me, it doesn’t seem sustainable in its own way. If you’re doing something different every time then you’re probably doing some things that you shouldn’t be doing every time too. Because you don’t have a plan. Despite the experience you have making magazines do you see yourself going to a place where it’s more formal? Do you see yourself going to a place where Yannick isn’t writing everything or Junshen isn’t taking all the photos? Where is this going?

Junshen Wu: I think it really depends on what's next going to be. Because it could also be the next issue, I’m not going to take a single picture anymore, we’re just going to call for a contribution. But the last one was definitely very special. It feels more like an album, like a music album making than a magazine. But I think it’s a lot of different projects under the format of the magazine.

Jannic Moeken: I think in a way I understand what you’re saying, but it also feels very sustainable this way in the sense that we are self-published so we can do what we want and we do what we want so it can like, and maybe what we want is something different each time.

And as long as the readers go along with it, I think we’re good. It’s when it comes to down to like us writing or photographing everything in it, it’s also not that we do that because we think we do a better job at it than other people would, but it’s just, I think if I speak for myself, I see myself as less of an editor of a magazine than that. I enjoy actually making it. I enjoy writing it. I enjoy fiddling around with the sentences. I enjoy looking for a perfect prop cycling around Berlin to some weird outskirts, like picking up something that I bought online or making props, building sets, like doing all of those really hands-on things are really enjoyable to me.

I think we’re all just really also interested in actually making it, not because we think we’re so good at it, but just because it’s fun.

Sandra von Mayer-Myrtenhain: Also, I think you’re totally right. It is not sustainable. It wouldn’t be sustainable if we were a quarterly magazine, but at the moment we produce one magazine a year. And so we do have some time as well.

Arjun Basu: Yeah, but it just seems to me that you are holding a lot of things together as the managing editor here, because you are making sure that the other two people are getting their work done and I just have a feeling—

Sandra von Mayer-Myrtenhain: —they do most of the work, though.

Arjun Basu: Someone is holding this together. So you talk about your readers. Who are your readers?

Sandra von Mayer-Myrtenhain: I think it’s a very diverse group of readers.

Junshen Wu: It’s a really interesting question because I’m constantly surprised. Every time we have an event in our studio, when I look around and see who comes to these events, it’s a very mixed crowd. We have people from 18 to 70, I think. And different genders and people from everywhere in the world and from different cultural backgrounds. And I could say that most of them are interested in food at least.

Jannic Moeken: Also, I think there are also people that aren’t necessarily what you would call “foodies.” The magazine also speaks to a lot of other things. It’s also about literature and film and society and politics and it’s about many topics.

Sandra von Mayer-Myrtenhain: I think we actually lose the people who expect recipes, “Oh, you’re a food magazine, you don’t have recipes.” We just lose them.

Arjun Basu: Do you have food at your launch events?

Junshen Wu: Yeah, but we actually do, yeah it’s really funny. So we have, on every cover, there is like a "cover star" and then we serve this star at the launch event.

Sandra von Mayer-Myrtenhain: A pie or a smiley fry. And we usually serve these "cover stars" just as finger food, no dinner party.

Arjun Basu: No dinner party.

Sandra von Mayer-Myrtenhain: No.

Arjun Basu: But you talked about a lot of people who write in, you get a lot of emails. What are they saying?

Jannic Moeken: The people usually come in from one specific angle. I feel like they read an article about a specific topic that they enjoyed and, like an appreciation for that. Or also I think it’s the kind of magazine that apparently, some people at least, have been wanting to read. This sort of mix of food magazines that’s not really about food. And I think people enjoy the combination between the text and the visuals. That’s mostly I think, what we get.

Junshen Wu: I think apart from the general appreciation, the ones I really loved to get are like, they share a personal story with us. Like the one I said, “Oh I’m a huge fan of Shelley Duvall. I really appreciate you. This means so much to me.”

But also there are some really specific foods we talked about in the article, not necessarily in an attractive way, like food and crime and things like that, but people will write an email and share, “Oh, I actually have a personal memory and personal story about this.” Or a specific recipe we talked about. Or they got inspired from one of the articles and said, “Oh, I want to cook that.”

Sandra von Mayer-Myrtenhain: Fad diets, for example. A lot of people just, “I remember my mom doing this diet or this diet.”

Arjun Basu: So that initial group that you guys, when you started talking about these things before you started the website, even in a way you were what you were talking about was actually a very universal kind of discussion. If all these people are engaging with you on a personal level.

Sandra von Mayer-Myrtenhain: I guess we see food as like a vehicle to tell stories. It’s like a medium. And food tells so much about our society where we stand. And as you say you think that this last issue is dark, but we also believe that we’re living in pretty dark times. So we still try to introduce a little bit of fun like “the last herring.” We think there are some funny moments in there, actually, but it is a mirror of our times as well.

Arjun Basu: Indeed. What has surprised you the most about publishing this magazine? What have you learned?

Junshen Wu: That there is always more work than you thought there is.

Jannic Moeken: Yeah. I think for me it feels crazy to see people in a place I’ve never been to post a picture of a magazine of ours that we made here in Berlin under, like you also said, like circumstances that aren’t like entirely professional, maybe, that then lands somewhere and people buy it, take a picture of it. Or there was one person who posted the latest issue saying, "I just bought this, so excited to read it. I’ve been waiting for this." That, to me, is really crazy that it has this life of its own that we’re completely unaware of, that it happens outside of us.

Sandra von Mayer-Myrtenhain: And I wasn’t surprised, but I really love that people are engaging so much with our magazine, with other magazines, that there is still this love for magazines because we love magazines. I think it wasn’t a surprise, but almost like a confirmation. And it’s just beautiful to see and hear all these people engaging.

Arjun Basu: Is the tone of the correspondence with you different than when you were just a website ? Is it a different kind of email you’re getting from the website to the magazine, or is it, or has it changed or not changed at all?

Junshen Wu: I would say a very funny thing is like the response got longer. I think when you are online, it’s a DM reaction. Could be like a thumbs up, it could be like a heart emoji. Or like, "love that!" "Looks great." But I think when people want to write you an email they probably have a longer engagement with the content they have just read. And I think right now the emails are longer. That’s the difference.

Sandra von Mayer-Myrtenhain: And maybe more engagement as well, or more responses.

Arjun Basu: So what does the future of this look like?

Sandra von Mayer-Myrtenhain: We should have done the interview a week later, because we’re having a meeting about that next week.

Jannic Moeken: That’ll definitely be another issue.

Arjun Basu: If you have a major decision you’ll let us know so I can put it into my introduction for the show. Who would you invite to your famous dinner party if you had one person to invite, each of you?

Sandra von Mayer-Myrtenhain: I wouldn’t have prepared for that one. Shelley Duvall, no? It has to be Shelley Duvall, definitely.

Arjun Basu: Shelley Duvall does seem like someone who would be a lot of fun at a dinner party, for sure. Or would’ve, yeah. Anyone else?

Junshen Wu: I would really love to invite Maangchi. Do you know her? I’ve been watching her videos for so long. It would be great to have her. But it will also be so scary to cook for her.

Arjun Basu: That’s true. I think if you don’t cook Korean food, you know you’ll be okay. But she does seem like she’s open to everything. Okay, we always end the show with this one question, and there’s three of you, so I’m going to ask it three times. What are three magazines that are exciting you the most right now? Let’s start with Yannic.

Jannic Moeken: Okay. I’ve recently been looking at some issues of Club Sandwich magazine. It’s been a while since the last one came out. I’m not sure if there are plans for another one right now, but I hope so. And it’s still to me like just a really great food magazine that also just uses food in an interesting way. And it just looks so great, texts are great. So I’ve always admired that magazine.

Then secondly, I really enjoy Monochromator, who’s also been on your show. I find it really interesting the way they always take two different films and in the combination of looking at them together, they reveal more than they would’ve on their own. And I find that concept really interesting and it’s something I feel like I also try to do sometimes in writing texts. So I find it just really—it’s just, it just works.

And then lastly, I just have to say The New Yorker because I just really enjoy that form of long form essays and journalism. And over the last a hundred years, they’ve just had really amazing writers work for them. So that’s just always a great magazine.

Arjun Basu: Sandra?

Sandra von Mayer-Myrtenhain: So I enjoy some of Yannic’s magazines as well, but I want to mention different ones. I really enjoy Gida Journal, which is produced between creatives from Accra and London about creative communities shaping West African culture. It’s visually really interesting, very well done. I really enjoy it. It hasn’t come out that often yet.

Then I love Mono.Kultur, which has been around for quite a while, done by Kai von Rabenau. He is based in Berlin as well, and he has this really beautiful monoculture in this beautiful small format as well. Every issue is dedicated to one person or project. And that has people from the fashion industry, architects or film directors, musicians.

I think it’s a very beautiful format dedicated to one person. And it’s funny that within these few pages, there’s so many different papers as well, and like a, I think although it’s very simply produced, it has a lot of small details, which are really nice. And I hope there’s a new issue coming out at one point again. It’s been quite a while as well since the last one was issued.

And I really enjoy The Passenger, which is always dedicated to one country or one region, telling stories about the country told by locals, shot by local photographers. Whenever I traveled somewhere, like last year I went to Nigeria, I was happy to find a Passenger about Nigeria. I just bought the Thailand one and can’t wait to read it.

Arjun Basu: Junshen?

Junshen Wu: The first one I’m going to say: FatBoy Zine. Sandra gifted me the first one several years ago. And then I really loved it. And since then I’m a fan and then I also at some point started to reach out to them. And then we were writing on Instagram, and then we became really good friends.

What I really love about FatBoy Zine is like the first two issues, the personal angle. And it’s very emotional and then also, of course, the graphic design is just wild. Because my own work is very reserved in emotions, so I really appreciate works that express emotions that extensively. And later when he opened up for contribution this quality of keeping it personal and emotional still lingers and I really appreciate that.

And the second one I’m going to say is The Gourmand magazine. It’s just one of the best magazines I think. And not only in the food section. Through the years they inspired me a lot about what is the position of food in visual culture and the ways you can use food. Or the ways you can observe food in different kinds of visual creativities. So I think they haven’t been publishing new magazines for a long time, but recently I’ve also been just browsing some old issues. I still think they’re pretty relevant to this day.

And third one, I’m going to say i-D magazine. And also their platform, their Instagram, the TikTok accounts, because a very important aspect of Famous for My Dinner Parties is to connect with the feeling of the time, the zeitgeist and the where we’re living now. I’m also really interested in that. I want to know what’s happening in popular culture. So I think i-D magazine is a really nice source to gather that information.

Arjun Basu: Great. Thank you very much. Thanks for being here.