A conversation with Max Meighen and Nicola Hamilton, the team behind Serviette.

The pandemic screwed a lot of businesses over, but it did a real number on the restaurant industry. Beset by low margins at the best of times, Covid was to the business what a neglected pot of boiling milk is to your stove top. But Max Meighen, a restaurant owner in Toronto decided to fill in his down time by … creating a magazine. Because of course he did.

And so he cooked up Serviette, a magazine about food that feels and looks and reads unlike any other food title around.

Nicola Hamilton came on as Creative Director soon thereafter. She had worked for a number of Canadian titles and during Covid, founded Issues Magazine Shop, one of Canada’s—if not the world’s—leading independent magazine shops. Because of course she did.

Food magazines, like all media, have gone through a lot recently, and the changes wrought by digital media have been amplified by Influencers, TikTokers, Instagram recipe makers, Substackers, bloggers, you name it. The food industry is ruthless and not for the weak. And I think you’ll find that both Max and Nicola are anything but. They are, quite simply, Master Chefs.

“This is a reaction to is the status quo that I think we all acknowledge is crappy. The way food is produced and distributed and where value is collected and or concentrated.”

— Max Meighen, Founder

Arjun Basu: So Max, we’ll start with you. We’ll go alphabetically. Nicola, you were like barely in second place on this one. Max, tell us how you got here. And what did you do leading up to Serviette?

Max Meighen: That’s an excellent question. My original line of work was in restaurants and restaurant kitchens. Something I continue to this day. I own and operate a restaurant in Toronto’s East end called Avling. And we had the great fortune of opening in the summer of 2019, which was a great time for restaurants, great time for the city.

And then as everybody knows a short time after that, the world came to a screeching halt. And I really wanted to stay connected to the world of restaurants, to the world of food, to the ideas that food does such a good job of embodying and communicating. It’s a big part of the restaurant itself exploring and promoting and growing the circular food economy.

So I wanted to stay tapped in and connected to that world. And so I briefly considered a newsletter. We had a newsletter for the restaurant, but that seemed like a very low barrier to entry. A lot of people were starting newsletters and it felt like it could be very easy to get lost in the kind of the new chorus of people jumping online and having conversations.

And I’d always been a huge fan of print. I’ve always really admired its ability to connect conversations and design and kind of curate communities. And if running a restaurant wasn’t enough of a challenge I decided to get into publishing because, because why not?

Arjun Basu: Yeah. That’s like two of the easiest fields to enter. Nicola, how about you?

Nicola Hamilton: Yeah, so I come from commercial magazines. I’m a graphic designer, a traditionally trained graphic designer who has spent the last 15 years of my career working in magazines. So I worked on publications like The Grid, which you will only know if you lived in Toronto from 2011–2014.

I’ve spent time at Chatelaine, which is one of Canada’s oldest women’s magazines. I’ve worked at a studio that designed magazines for clients. And in July of 2022, I opened Issues Magazine Shop. So I took my love of print magazines to a whole new level and opened a brick-and-mortar store dedicated to independent print publications.

And I met Max through Issues. I reached out to Max to stock the first issue. The first issue had come out just before Issues opened, and so I reached out to Max to stock that issue, and we became pals after that, and I started working on Serviette with the third issue.

Arjun Basu: Okay, so that’s your meet story, and we will get to Issues as a sidebar, more than a sidebar. So what is Serviette exactly?

Max Meighen: Serviette is an arts and culture, design, architecture, urbanism magazine, all through a food and drink lens. It’s as if Monocle was only focused on food, basically.

We like to obviously explore food and the people behind it, but more than the individual restaurants or the individual chefs that are making a name for themselves, it’s about the ideas that underpin both the systems, the traditions, the culture, the heritage, the future of food and how, as I touched on a moment ago, how food, at least for me, is such an excellent vehicle for so many important ideas, and it is a way of both understanding the world around us, but also a means to affect change or to imagine a different world.

It’s so powerful. It is something that all of us necessarily have to engage with every day. And beyond transcribed restaurant reviews or individual profiles, we really peel the layers back a little bit and reflect on how food is really one of the most fundamentally human things out there.

Arjun Basu: Do you want to add to that, Nicola? That’s pretty thorough.

Nicola Hamilton: Yeah. Our editor-in-chief of the last two issues wrote a really eloquent “About” statement about Serviette that I think does such a good job of saying exactly what it is we do. Danielle Groen put together the statement: “Serviette is a magazine about food, the people who grow it and produce it, the distances we travel to eat it, and all the ways it’s tangled up with culture, science, history, and design.” So that’s the succinct way.

Max Meighen: That’s how a trained editor would describe Serviette.

Arjun Basu: Yeah, but as a former editor myself, I really appreciated that because the proof of everything she’s saying is in the following pages. It really does. She set up that mission statement and Max, it does feel like an extension of the restaurant.

Max Meighen: Yeah, absolutely. I deliberately don’t describe Serviette as a brand magazine and is not a kind of an official arm of Avling the restaurant, but it very much is a different way of having the same types of conversations. And the circularity, the sort of trying to undiscover, rediscover, rather, lost or underappreciated elements of the local landscape and how that can have an impact on flavor. That’s the experiential aspect that we explore through the restaurant.

And then the magazine does a very similar thing, but through conversation and through design and through bringing people together for a broader conversation. So it is very much two sides of the same coin, though I wouldn’t necessarily say that Serviette’s out there to try and push more people to the restaurant. It has a very Canadian—and at times, Torontonian—point of view, but its reach and its audience, hopefully, is very global.

Arjun Basu: It definitely has been getting noticed around the world. What is a Serviette story?

Max Meighen: That’s an excellent question. It’s hard to define it. But if pressed to, I think a Serviette story has food at its core, but might not necessarily need to mention food every other paragraph. Or it’s obvious that food is the kind of the beating heart of the idea, but it often extends beyond that.

Much beyond that an example that comes to mind is one of the features that we had in our very first issue, which was about growing food at home. We spoke to the folks at Space 10, which was the former design lab set up by Ikea in Copenhagen, and the story was a conversation about how to design—at an industrial/global scale—how to design for home gardening and home food growing. What challenges are there around trying to not only encourage people to grow food, but to make it easier and fit within the Ikea aesthetic?

So growing more food at home is a very obviously food focused story. But it was fundamentally a design story. It was about a bunch of Danish designers trying to solve a problem like they would any other, but with food at its very center.

Nicola Hamilton: For me, a Serviette story is the best kind of dinner party conversation. It’s something that's really informative, but also really entertaining. And I think, to Max’s point, it uses food as the cornerstone and then spirals off from there. I think about Mr. Tayto—“Tale of Two Taytos” was a story in this current issue of Serviette—that was a pitch that came in to us from Anna Cafolla and it’s about the separation of Ireland between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland and the two potato chip companies of the same name that exist on either sides of the border. So while that’s about food, it’s about potato chips, it’s also about politics and history and business.

“A ‘Serviette’ story is the best kind of dinner party conversation. It’s something that’s really informative, but also really entertaining”

— Nicola Hamilton, Designer

Arjun Basu: All encompassing. And what about the look of the magazine? How is it conceived visually?

Nicola Hamilton: It’s a tricky question for me to answer. So I didn’t create the original look and feel of Serviette. Max, you want to talk a little bit about engaging Concrete and the first two issues?

Max Meighen: Yeah, absolutely. I just circle back to the idea of the restaurant and the magazine being linked in a number of ways. The same design agency that I worked with on the brand of the restaurant, Concrete Studio, here in Toronto when I had the idea for the magazine.

I approached them and wanted to create an original title, original art directions or brand guidelines. And we looked at three different directions and the resulting direction, what we ended up with, was a sort of a combination of, I think, something that felt very, kind of, designerly—sort of “design for designers”—and something that was very accessible and probably familiar to the mainstream publishing and print world.

It was important to me to try and have something that felt different, that felt fresh, felt like the designers had a hand in this because food and restaurants and everything else is very designed.

And it is a very considered, thoughtful, artistically-curated endeavor. And so I wanted the magazine to have a familiar feel, but there’s always a sort of a balance to be struck between design—interesting new layouts and typefaces and approaches—and approachability. And I think it was a great compromise that we were able to strike there.

Arjun Basu: As a magazine, as a print product, were there any inspirations for Serviette, or is it something new in that sense?

Max Meighen: Certainly Monocle was a big inspiration in the way in which they approach a lot of their pieces and their tone of voice and the, I’d say, the optimistic tone that they maintain. That was a big inspiration.

As well as a few other food magazines: Lucky Peach is definitely one that I remember really loving. Though it occurred to me, I was working as a chef at the time Lucky Peach was publishing, and it did strike me that this was an “insider’s” industry magazine.

It had some appeal outside of the industry, but I think a lot of the stories, a lot of the way in which the pieces were framed, who they were talking to, how they were talking to them, it was for restaurant people. And there’s not necessarily anything wrong with that. But when we were conceiving of the magazine and how I wanted it to look and feel, there were plenty of little Cartesian diagrams that we laid out and plotted, the different magazines, from accessible to niche and culinary to culture general culture.

Nicola Hamilton: Yeah. From an art direction perspective, I don’t think there’s any particular magazine we’re pulling inspiration from. I’m pulling inspiration from the original brand guidelines that Concrete put together for Max years ago, and playing off of them, putting my own spin on it.

I definitely seek most of the inspiration for the art ideas and the creative direction from the photographers and illustrators that we’re collaborating with. So often we start with a silly idea or a complicated idea or something that’s really vague. And different from some of the commercial magazine deadlines I’ve had in the past, we have the luxury of a little bit more time and a little bit more freedom with Serviette.

And so that affords us the opportunity to really drill down or to play or to explore ideas. So those photographers and illustrators are definitely the folks that are inspiring me in the art direction side of things.

Arjun Basu: Do you guys think Serviette is a reaction to other food magazines or Big Food Magazine Industrial Complex, food media. Does the existence of Serviette imply something in and of itself?

Max Meighen: It’s tough to say that it's necessarily a reaction or a counterpoint to—

Arjun Basu: —trying to get you out of your polite Canadian here.

Max Meighen: …Fair enough. Okay. I don’t hide the fact that I’m incredibly passionate about food and not that’s something you would hide, but I think what this is a reaction to is the status quo that I think we all acknowledge is crappy. The way food is produced and distributed and where, along the chain, value is collected and or concentrated.

Okay. I don’t think it’s necessarily a reaction against another food publication because physical publications in this day and age—it’s all a counterpoint to that digitization. That’s the funny thing about print these days, it doesn’t matter whether it’s Serviette or Saveur or Family Style or Vogue, we’re all pushing up the same hill. And it has proven time and again, that even the people at Condé Nast don’t necessarily have all the answers.

And so I wouldn’t say that there’s somebody out there that’s gaming the system or doing something the wrong way in publishing, and we’re here to do it the right way. I think there’s a big world of food that sucks and isn’t serving people well. And I also think that food maybe at times can seem like a bit of a closed-door insiders club,not touching on the newest restaurant.

We’re not feeding into the exclusivity or the sort of rarefied nature that food culture can sometimes perpetuate. This is a magazine for everybody because food is for everybody. And it’s for anybody who wants to share ideas and share food, and the joy and spontaneity, and, I don’t know, energizing experience that that entails.

Arjun Basu: And one of the reasons I asked that is because, it doesn’t, it definitely doesn’t look like any other food magazine. But it doesn’t read like it either. It’s not consumptive in a weird way—if you can even say that about a food magazine—it’s not about “go here,” “eat that.”

Max Meighen: Because those things change. Those things, those trends, those chefs, those restaurants, they open, they close, and as a magazine, as a thoughtfully-produced, beautifully-designed magazine, this is something that hopefully people leave out on display in their homes for a long period of time.

Restaurants are a hard business. It’s not inconceivable that if we were to cover something between the time of writing about it, it going to print, distributing it, and then the next issue coming up, that restaurant may have come and gone. But the passion for food and the ideas and the food culture, the traditions, the underlying energy there that’s evergreen, that never goes away.

And yeah, I didn’t deliberately set out to create a magazine, a food magazine that wasn’t consumptive, that wasn’t trying to steer away or keep our distance from trends or from what was seemed relevant or cool or interesting at the time. It was about what’s universal in this world. And we have yet to even scratch the surface.

And it’s not as though we’re going to run out of content anytime soon or any ideas anytime soon. So we haven’t really felt a need to go to that “What’s cool?” “What’s current?” “What’s the latest?” “What are people going to want to consume right now?”

Arjun Basu: The world is already well served by that, Nicola.

Nicola Hamilton: Ha. Yeah

Arjun Basu: II only realized what I’d said as it was coming out of my mouth. Sorry.

Nicola Hamilton: I was thinking it, don’t worry. When Max approached me to work on the magazine, there were a few things that made me really excited about this project. One, it takes considerable bravery, and maybe naïvete, to start a magazine—

Max Meighen: —moreso the latter.

Nicola Hamilton: —in 2022, when Max decided to do this. And that’s exciting to me, right? I very quickly will saddle up beside anybody who’s willing to take a risk like that to do something that they really care about. And if it’s in print, even better.

And when I asked Max why. “Why do you make this magazine? What is this magazine for you?” Max said something along the lines—and Max, clarify whatever words you want to use here—but Max said something along the lines of, “Food is the closest thing I have to ritual.”

So cooking, breaking bread, eating with people, that’s a ritual. And to me, that’s what we’ve tried to make this magazine—or at least Danielle Groen and I have tried to make this magazine over the last two issues—is coming back to the ritual of print, sitting down and reading something, thinking about the stories, how they butt up against each other, right? Like which course comes when? Are you cleansing the palate between two heavy stories?—just to further our food metaphors here—and so really thinking about it as that sort of ritual of reading it cover to cover is something we think about a lot.

“This is a magazine for everybody because food is for everybody. It’s for anybody who wants to share ideas and share food, and the joy and spontaneity, and energizing experience that that entails.”

— Meighen

Arjun Basu: Print really is like a good sit down meal, whereas everything else feels like fast food. So to keep it going.

Nicola Hamilton: I think the other thing that’s important to note there is just, like, a genuine curiosity. Neither Danielle or I come from a place of food. Max is our food expert here. Danielle and I come from general-interest magazines, city publications, and women’s media. We don’t come from food in this way.

And so finding stories that all three of us get excited about has actually probably strengthened the fabric of the magazine. Like things that we get excited about more for the curiosity in the story than in their value as food media.

Arjun Basu: Yeah, to take the food metaphor a little further. What does the next course of Serviette look like? Taste like?

Nicola Hamilton: I can talk about the next issue and then maybe Max can talk about bigger things that I have less say in. For the next issue, our theme is “Food Is Place,” and that’s going to take us a little everywhere. The best part about this decision Max made early on to theme each issue was that the themes have been quite broad. So it’s so much fun to think about how we can pull the idea of “Food Is Place” apart and then put it back together. And I’m pretty excited about this fifth issue.

Max Meighen: Just to slightly expand on that, it has been a lot of fun to take the themes that we have gone through thus far—consumption, preservation, absurdity, and place—and deliberately avoid the obvious answers to those questions. To stick with food is place, the upcoming issue, we don’t have anything on terroir or the local cheese or wine that can only be grown in this specific place, and this is therefore such an authentic expression of place. Those are great stories, but they’ve been told a million times in other places. And so…

Nicola Hamilton: Instead we have someone who’s growing citrus and avocado on Salt Spring Island, BC, in a place where they shouldn’t be able to grow those things.

Max Meighen: Yeah. Another good way of explaining succinctly what Serviette is all about is taking themes that are familiar to the food world—preservation, consumption, place—and turning over the rocks that no one else has touched because, looking in the corners, the dark corners that no one else has thought to explore and trying to understand how those themes have an implication for food and in unexpected ways.

As for the future of Serviette, on a larger scale I think it looks probably quite similar to what other smartly-run publications look like. I’d love to do more in-person events—and obviously a food magazine is beautifully well-suited to in-person events and gatherings and collaborations.

Also, originally when I worked with Concrete way back when to create the art direction for the magazine, we started on—and deliberately left it half-finished—but we started on branding and an identity for a food symposium. A sort of MAD universe—that’s the Danish Noma MAD that used to run its own symposium and now has an academy that runs sustainability and restaurant business courses.

Their approach to food has been not only a big inspiration, but when I went to their symposium, I was really blown away by the power and the value of bringing together everybody in the food industry. And by that, the sort of the farmers, the people in fishery, servers, chefs, journalists, really anybody and everybody who is tangentially related to this industry, because it is such a complex industry.

And there’s so many different aspects that push and pull on the quality of not only restaurant food, but the food that people can get in schools and institutions and in the grocery store and on the street. It’s universal. So I would love to see Serviette be the impetus for a similar symposium in North America, most likely Toronto, but reflecting the one that was done in Copenhagen for a number of years.

I think the food industry, restaurant specifically, is in the wilderness right now, post-pandemic, with inflation still a bit of this ominous specter, people not really knowing what to focus on, where to put their time and effort and energy, and a sort of a dining public that has their own priorities and sort of interest shifting.

It has been a long time since the restaurant industry, definitely in Toronto, certainly Canada, probably North America, has had an opportunity to come together as a whole kind of collective. There’s the Welcome Conference in New York every year, but that is uniquely, and probably rightly so, focused on front of house. There really hasn’t been anything like that in the past. But something that is reflective of the entire industry and all facets thereof. I really think it’s time for another one. Hopefully that is also in our future.

Arjun Basu: Not like you don’t wear many hats. Nicola, you also wear many hats. You, of course, run Issues, which is one of those magazine shops that everyone raves about once they’ve discovered it. And it’s an important place in the indie magazine ecosystem, I’d say, around the world. So you’re someone who has their pulse, in a wa,y on the magazine world as a store, as a seller of magazines. What have you learned about the magazine world in general and how has it confounded your expectations, and even changed, in the little time that you’ve opened the store?

Nicola Hamilton: Oof. I think one of the biggest things that I learned really quickly when I first started diving into this project—so I spent the first half of 2022 really focused on whether or not Issues, a magazine retailer, could exist and could sustain itself. And I had a lot of help from our mutual friend, Jeremy Leslie in London, the founder of magCulture.

And the more I dove into this business, the more I realized that the narrative we had been fed about the print industry failing, one of ad sales being down dramatically, and people not wanting to read anymore, was, maybe true, not the entirety of the story. Distribution and retail behind the scenes are also really broken in Canada. They’re broken in lots of parts of the world but in Canada in particular, they’re really busted.

And that was a big insight for me, who had worked in commercial magazines and who had been fed those narratives: of us needing to be in more places and to write more stories. People wanted to read and all of that pressure was being put on the production teams when in actuality, it was everything that happened after we made that magazine that we didn’t have a lot of insight on.

So that was a big one. I think the other big perspective shift that happened—when we opened our doors in July of 2022, I couldn’t believe how young our audience was. So I had assumed that our audience would be primarily people in their mid-thirties through their mid-fifties. Those millennial types who remember the nostalgia of reading a print magazine who were raised on print publications, but in actuality, most of our audience is closer to 25.

And I think that’s for a whole handful of reasons when we ask groups of them here in the shop. Why magazines? Why are you here? How’d you get here? One, they find us on TikTok, which yay for all of those nice people who post about us on TikTok. But they often tell us. “I spend my whole day on the internet and sitting down to read something in print is so lovely.”

Another anecdote we get pretty often is that if I’m just seeking inspiration online, I’m being fed the same images as my peers. If I come and find a magazine that no one else has seen before, or that none of my peers have seen before, I can establish my own taste in a different way, my own interests in a different way. So young people, like they always have, are seeking individualism in some way, and magazines are still a great way to do that. Like they were when I was a teenager.

“Young people prioritize interesting spaces, cool spaces full of other cool people to go and seek out their inspiration. And most newsstands are convenience stores these days. And those aren’t particularly sexy places to seek inspiration.
”

— Hamilton on her Toronto shop, Issues

Arjun Basu: Yeah. You are probably the third or fourth guest to use the word distribution as their, like the surprise and the reality of it. And no one talks about that. The subsidies, the postal subsidies that a lot of the magazines you’ve worked for depended on are no more. In the States as well. And that’s a really big deal. And the second thing is, you said TikTok. And as a writer I hate the publicity that a writer has to do for their books, but I’m just thinking who do I know that can get my book into “Book Tok.” And so you are not the first person to say that young people are into it. And, I don’t know if they’re rediscovering it or something. But yeah, they’re tired of screens and they like touching something. It’s a sensual experience.

Nicola Hamilton: Absolutely. And they’re discovering it for the first time. And so I think one of the other things folks don’t talk about very often on the sort of backside of producing a magazine is that as distribution has gotten harder and harder, as the distributors have dropped the profit margin for retailers, lower and lower retailers have disappeared.

It doesn’t make sense to run a retail business if your profit margin is only 15 or 20%. That’s really hard to do, which is why we saw so many news agents give shelf space over to more traditional wholesale product like candy and soft drinks. Which means that there’s an entire generation of people who didn’t have access to publications. They had to really seek them out. They weren’t being exposed to them the same way we were being exposed to them.

So when I was opening Issues, as much as the financial backers, the banks would have preferred that I opened an online business only—or started that way because the capital investment was less—the physical space was so important to me. It is an essential experience. You want to pick it up and touch it. You want to smell the paper. You want that sort of sense of discovery of flipping through the stacks and finding something that really speaks to you.

And I do think that young people prioritize interesting spaces, cool spaces full of other cool people to go and seek out their inspiration. That experience is important to them. And most newsstands are convenience stores these days, or your grocery store, or your pharmacy, and those aren’t particularly sexy places to seek inspiration.

Arjun Basu: No, they’re not. And you are doing or have just done or are about to do a pop up at a second location in another part of town.

Nicola Hamilton: Correct.

Arjun Basu: Is that a trial run for issues number two or?

Nicola Hamilton: So for two months, we’re going to trial the Issues Outpost, which will be smaller than our sort of HQ on the West side of the city. To see what having a second location looks like, if people come and visit us and the sort of hope is that, yeah, people will come, they’ll see us and we can make that pop up permanent in that space. We’ll see, though.

Arjun Basu: That’s great. Okay. I’m going to ask each of you. What are three magazines or media that are exciting you right now, Max?

Max Meighen: I recently finished a degree in brand strategy at the School of Visual Arts in New York, so I have been revisiting B Magazine, which is out of Korea. Each magazine covers different brands in depth from a number of different angles. And so that has been really interesting to revisit and rediscover their brand deep dives.

I’ve also picked up and have just cracked open a book called Sitopia by Carolyn Steel, which is about food and how it’s such a powerful tool for placemaking. And probably unsurprisingly, I’ve been watching the Apple TV Omnivore series which is produced and narrated by the Noma head chef, Rene Redzepi which takes a very Serviette approach I’d say to its stories.

Arjun Basu: I was going to bring it up. I love the story about tuna in Japan. That it was some sort of logistics guy at JAL, at the airline, who got Japan hooked on tuna, essentially.

Max Meighen: Yeah. And that is a Serviette story—that the tastes of a country as big as Japan were fundamentally altered by a pencil pusher at an airline. And the knock-on effect of that is that tuna has become critically endangered as a result. So it’s been very interesting to watch a series do that with a number of different ingredients.

Arjun Basu: Yeah, the banana episode. Nicola?

Nicola Hamilton: I am going to cite—always a perennial favorite—the new issue of MacGuffin just left the warehouse for Issues. The theme of this next issue is “The Wall.” And that’s always a favorite.

We just hosted the launch party for the ninth issue of LSTW. Les Spread the Word is a Montréal-based lesbian magazine. And this issue had two PWHL players on the cover—two female hockey players from Montréal—and it sold out at the launch party. They are fully sold out of that issue. So it’s pretty special. I’m hoping they do a reprint.

And then I always love talking to people about all of our Toronto-made independent publications: Bully, which is a Black-led fashion publication, Darby is a Canadian soccer culture journal—sports is having a fun moment—Feelszine, I adore. It’s a risograph-printed magazine. They’ve done 22 issues now. Just big love for all of our Canadian-made publications.

Arjun Basu: Thanks.

Nicola Hamilton: Oh, thank you for real.

Max Meighen: Yeah.

Nicola Hamilton: It’s such a treat.