Chris Ying On Lucky Peach, Indie Publishing And Vivid Ideas

A venture between Momofuku’s superstar chef David Chang and Dave Eggers’ McSweeney’s publishing house, Lucky Peach emerged at a time when all the noise about the “death of print media” has become an unavoidable drone. And yet, the magazine’s impact has been a knockout.  “I thought we’d sell 5,000 or 10,000 maybe,” says editor-in-chief Chris Ying of the first issue, which appeared in June 2011. “Ultimately, we ended up selling out of three print runs – something like 75,000 copies.”

For anyone who’s picked up the magazine, its success should come as no surprise. Lucky Peach covers viewpoints from the world’s best chefs – Rene Redzepi, Christina Tosi, Magnus Nilsson – while advising you to cellar your Spam like “fine wine”, and save the seasoning packet from your instant ramen to create a potato chip dip (a trick courtesy of Pavement’s bassist, Mark Ibold).

It’s not your typical food magazine – it features zombie diner recipes, after all – but it’s got an impressive roll call of food-world heavyweights as contributors, and its content is as original as it is wise-cracking and fun.

In Australia for Vivid Ideas, Ying talked to me about Lucky Peach and why it’s such a big deal for independent publishing – a topic he’ll be revisiting at his events on the festival program. He also brought up bike sting operations, and the Sydney restaurant he’s spent the last two years battling cravings for.

Lee Tran Lam: The first issue of Lucky Peach – which is only two years old – recently appeared on eBay for $400 a copy. How do you react to that?

Chris Ying: I think it’s hilarious. It’s sad for me personally, because I’ve only got one tattered copy of the first issue. Well, I guess I’d have to pay that much [to replace it], which is depressing, but I think my mum gets a real kick out of it. She calls me all the time, to update me on the price that the issue is selling for.

She must’ve been happy that Lucky Peach received four James Beard Foundation Award nominations recently?

I was unabashedly excited about it; I called her and wanted her to be, “Wow, that’s amazing! That’s great, that’s so cool!” But she was like, “I saw some people gave you two stars on Amazon”.

It was funny,  I was with Dave Chang at the awards, and he adopted the same attitude; we were really happy that Fuchsia Dunlop’s article won an award, so we won one out of four categories; but each time we didn’t win a category – even if we weren’t nominated for it – Dave would turn to me and shake his head and tell me that I needed to work harder.

In Lucky Peach’s first issue, there’s a diary documenting writer Peter Meehan and David Chang’s adventures as they smash through bowls of ramen in Tokyo. At one point, David Chang has so much ramen he needs to throw up – but he won’t do so in the toilet, because of his extreme respect for Japanese toilets (admittedly, they are high-tech and amazing). In the same issue, you have Pavement bassist Mark Ibold writing about the best potato chips in the world.

When did you realise Lucky Peach wasn’t going to be your average food publication?

We never said anything to the effect of, “We’re going to make a food magazine that’s not like others”. We couldn’t make it a magazine like other people’s because we didn’t have the resources to. We can’t afford photo shoots, and for people to go on assignment. So we made the magazine that best spoke to what we could do.

The other motivation was to bring as many voices as we could from as many fields.

At Melbourne Writers Festival a few years ago, Dave Eggers talked about how he convinced big-name writers to contribute to McSweeney’s, despite having a restricted budget – it was all a case of being inventive. In exchange for a story from author Denis Johnson, McSweeney’s sent their then-volunteer carpenter Eli Horowitz [who later became managing editor, and who is bringing The Silent History to Vivid Ideas] to help build Denis Johnson’s cabin.

Have you also had to think quite creatively in order to get contributions on a small budget?

Certainly. It hasn’t been creative arrangements on how to compensate people; it’s more like – if a writer or chef could get paid a lot more to write an article for somebody else, you have to make it worth their while [at Lucky Peach], make it fun for them, work on an idea that they couldn’t get to do elsewhere. We’re creative in that way. For example, Anthony Bourdain writes a film column for us.

According to your Twitter feed, you spent a recent Saturday on a sting operation. Can I ask what that was about?

[Laughs] It was a silly thing. My friend had just had his bike stolen. He’d searched the online messageboards to see if it’d spring up for sale, and he found it. He asked me to drive him an hour from here to a little beach town where it was being sold. There were these cops in the city, they didn’t have much to do — there were three cops to help retrieve this one stolen bike.

You’re here at Vivid to talk about Lucky Peach and the possibilities of independent publishing. What are some things you’d like to single out for discussion?

We have a very small staff; whatever success we’ve had is off the back of people doing incredible jobs that are so beyond what they should be expected to do, for far less money than they should expect to make doing it. Lucky Peach is a positive example of what you can do with [independent] publishing these days, despite everyone’s negative outlook on it, and I would like to see more people do that.

As someone who works on a food magazine, do you have favourite places to eat in Australia?

Australia has great food; I’ve had really good Asian food in Sydney and Melbourne.

For the last two years, I’ve been craving Spice I Am; I have to go back there. David [Chang]’s Momofuku Seiobo in Sydney — I haven’t been, so I’m looking forward to that.

What’s coming up for Lucky Peach?

After the Travel issue [out in June] is our Gender issue. This is a crackpot idea I came up with, back when I wanted to do ‘Lucky Peach For Men’ and ‘Lucky Peach For Women’, both combined into one magazine.

Are you a bit scared of how controversial it will be?

No, because we tend to approach it in a sideways manner, and I’m not trying to ruffle any feathers. And we’re doing things that are a little tongue-in-cheek; we’ll tackle big issues, like gender equality in the kitchen, and we’ll also do milk recipes on the female side and cod sperm recipes on the male side, so it’s half fun and half serious.

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Chris Ying at Vivid Ideas: 

Lucky Sydney — A Lucky Peach Event: May 25, 4-5pm @ Grain Bar, Four Seasons Hotel (sold out)

Adam Liaw talks to Chris Ying about Lucky Peach and food writing.

Indie Magazines: High End Content, Low End Budgets: May 26, 4-6pm @ Museum Of Contemporary Art

Chris Ying and Mauro Bedoni, photo editor of the legendary Colors Magazine, discuss how independent publishers can thrive in the age of blogs and dwindling budgets.

The Future Of Digital Storytelling: May 28, 6-7pm @ Apple Store, Sydney

Chris Ying and Eli Horowitz talk about their project The Silent History, a groundbreaking novel written and designed especially for the iPad and iPhone.

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Lee Tran Lam is a writer based in Sydney. She runs a food blog and podcast called The Unbearable Lightness of Being Hungry, and sifts through lots of demos and tracks to bring you Local Fidelity on FBi radio.