Five years ago, in the throes of a global pandemic, food writer and author Jonathan Nunn launched Vittles, and with it a new chapter in culinary writing. For the uninitiated, Vittles is a Substack newsletter bringing together recipes, reviews and rich investigative journalism that are hard to imagine being published elsewhere.

A handful of media enterprises have aimed to challenge the conventions of food storytelling, from Parts Unknown to Vice’s Munchies, some of which have done a fine job of showcasing cuisines and restaurants historically overlooked by western media. Where Vittles stands pretty much alone is in providing such a nurturing testing ground for new authors. Many of its writers had never been published before, opening up the stiff borders of what food journalism entails and who gets to take part in it.

To mark its fifth anniversary, Vittles has published its very first print issue, a process that’s been “a mixture of gruelling and fun,” Nunn says. “Gruelling because half of the translation is stuff no-one wants to deal with, like distribution and proofing pull quotes, but it’s also been a lot more fun than assembling a newsletter.”

The inaugural issue involved “revisiting some of our old articles, tearing them up and reformulating them, commissioning new pieces in formats that wouldn’t work online but could work on the page, and thinking about how the flow might add something to both old and new articles. Above all, I think it allowed us to lean into the more playful side of our editorial sensibility, which can be difficult to communicate in an email newsletter.”

Expect deep dives on Chinatown’s most notorious restaurant and the remarkably complex web of curry awards in the UK; articles on the evolution of sushi in Pakistan and British food influencers in the US; and an oral history on the year 1987 in the London restaurant scene. If the contents sound niche, it’s because there is a crucial story to be told. There are also experimental pieces, puzzle pages, and an eclectic series of chippy reviews peppered throughout the magazine.

This playfulness also manifests in the magazine cover – an illustration by regular collaborator Sing Yun Lee – and Dan Biddulph’s editorial design, where the layouts, fonts and palettes happily switch from one article to the next. “We didn’t want to look like the essays were being plugged into a strict design system,” says Biddulph.

The most challenging parts were often the most enjoyable, chief among them a Venn diagram of River Café podcast guests. “In an overall sense, the call for an absurd amount of diversity in the treatments was such a fun part of this project. It would be rare to get this range of tasks from other clients, where usually whatever theme you present, a more simplified version is realised.”

The aim is to publish two issues per year, and plans for the next issue, provocatively themed ‘Bad Food’, are already in motion. Vittles is surely one of Substack’s runaway success stories – it currently ranks number five on its bestselling food and drink newsletters – and yet holding a print magazine offers a completely different reading experience. Where does this leave the Substack?

“I think the two things will supplement and flow into each other rather than cancel each other out,” Nunn says. “Hopefully it will also get us thinking more about what will work as an online piece and how we can use the format to the benefit of the article, in the same way we’ve done for print.”

Vittles issue one is out now; vittlesmagazine.com