dish turns 100

Maddie Ballard hears the story of the magazine’s illustrious 17-year history

“Nobody was more surprised than me to suddenly find myself with a food magazine,” says Catherine Bell, dish founding editor.

When she began the magazine in 2004, she owned the Epicurean Workshop, a famed Auckland cooking school and cookware shop, and had dreamed of starting a food title for years – but believed it was pie in the sky.

“I had seen that there was a gap in the market,” she says. “The only food magazine at that time was Cuisine. Then I met John [Baker] and Julian [Andrews] and discovered they were thinking of starting their own publishing company. It all just came together. Magazine publishing was completely new to me, so it was sensible to join forces with two seasoned magazine publishers.”

Catherine immediately asked Claire Aldous, who ran the Epicurean Workshop Cook School at the time, to come on board as the food editor – a role she’s held ever since.

Both Catherine and Claire remember the early days of dish as extremely exciting – and extremely busy. At the time the first issue was published, both were still working several days a week at the Cook School.

“Life did become a little bit mad,” laughs Catherine. “In 2006, I decided to get out of the Epicurean Workshop because there just wasn’t time to do it all. Certainly there wasn’t a dull moment, and I loved it all.”

Catherine remembers a big learning curve when she entered magazine publishing. “It irritated me that food magazines at the time were so predictable, always with the same type of story on the same page,” she says. “In my ignorance of how magazines worked, I wanted dish to be different every time. I soon learned that was an unrealistic thing for a magazine – that you needed a template, a format, so it couldn’t be different each time.”

But she loved developing the magazine’s editorial vision – and many aspects had great success from the get-go. Above all, dish was

intended to be approachable and inspiring for cooks of all abilities. Recipes were a key focus, and with a back catalogue of hundreds of recipes from 18 years at the Epicurean Workshop, as well as Claire creating new recipes, dish had plenty to choose from.

Catherine was also interested in championing the country’s small producers, even if they couldn’t afford to advertise.

“We did lots of stories about food producers, which was quite new then,” she remembers. “So dish wasn’t about chefs, and it wasn’t about chefs’ food. That was probably the biggest point of different between us and

Cuisine in those days.”

The magazine was well received, perceived as filling a decided gap in the market.

“There were certain things we decided to do differently right from the beginning,” recalls Claire. “For example, we didn’t do restaurant reviews – partly because having had the

Cook School for so many years, we’d seen the devastation that bad reviews wrought on chefs. Instead, we decided we’d focus on profiling people that we admired and wanted to support in the food industry.”

dish built an immediate rapport with readers, many of whom had attended the Epicurean Workshop over the years. “We wanted to really connect with readers,” says Catherine. “Right from early on, we held events to meet them, like ‘Dine with dish’.”

The magazine went through changes in editorial leadership over the years – with original deputy editor Victoria Wells succeeding Catherine as editor for several years, followed by Lisa Morton, and then Vanessa Marshall (who came to dish from Nadia) and Naomi Larkin (now editor at NZ House & Garden) in the space of just a couple of years. dish was also acquired by ICG Media, its current publishing company, when it bought Jones Publishing, owned by John Baker and Julian Andrews, in 2008.

The constant change had its challenges, recalls Claire, who was food editor through it all. “At one point, I’d had three editors in just over two years, and that was a real stretch,” she says. But in 2019, she was approached by Dave Atkins, managing director at ICG, who asked her who she’d like as editor. “I said, ‘I LOVE Sarah Tuck’. She’d been a

contributor for about five years at that point and I’d always found her the most inspiring, energetic person and wanted to work more closely with her. And Dave said, ‘So she’s been an editor?’ And I said ‘No, but she’s really smart, I don’t think it would be a problem if she wants the job’.”

Dave approached her and serendipitously, Sarah was at a point in her life where she was looking for a change. The rest is history.

“Having Sarah on board has been really remarkable for me,” says Claire. “She brought even more to the magazine than I ever dreamed would be possible. It’s been amazing to work with someone who’s a hands-on cook. Sarah coming on board gave me a huge, renewed energy for the magazine.”

dish today looks quite a bit different from when it began, thanks to Sarah’s distinctive modern styling. But its principles aren’t so far from where they began.

As Catherine remembers, dish initially aimed to emulate the Cook School classes – which taught people how to cook simple, good food at home. “Basically, we wanted to make cooking approachable. So in dish,

we always had lots of glossary terms, we’d explain things in italics, there would be notes at the bottom of a recipe explaining what an unusual ingredient was and where to get it, that sort of thing. In many ways, the original philosophy of celebrating easy home cooking is still there in today’s dish.”

Home recipes and championing food producers are still central to the magazine – reflecting those enduring reader interests. “I’m proud that we’ve still got a lot of original readers 17 years on,” says Claire. “It’s lovely to bump into people at the supermarket who say ‘Oh my God, I’ve still got Issue #1, I still cook from Issue #1 and I still love the magazine’.”

And as Dave has it, dish is only getting better. “I think the magazine has connected to the audience better and kept pace with a growing reader pool. Claire’s creating delicious recipes that people want to cook and eat. It’s never snooty, the covers are creative and appealing and Sarah’s just brought so much drive and commercial nous to the title. Definitely we’ve gone from strength to strength in the last few years.”

Cheers to that!