Swill Magazine, Issue Five

Edited by Myffy Rigby (ex-editor of The Sydney Morning Herald Good Food Guide) and featuring a roll-call of award-winning writers and photographers, irreverent reverence is the order of the day.

A quarterly publication, Swill is a collection of stories bedded in restaurant culture and all those soft places in between.

A celebration of beauty, told with intelligence and wit. The backbone of human culture, food and drink permeates every aspect of modern life in all kinds of ways. Swill gives voice to the strange, smart, beloved and unloved.

In this issue:

“What would you do if you were hit by an earthquake in the middle of the night in Oaxaca? If you’re Mexico-based photographer Andrew Reiner, you roll over and go back to sleep. In keeping with the photojournalist’s gift for adaptability, he spent a week in the southern Mexico mountain town, doing midnight beer runs for agave farmers and recording what he ate around the markets that keep the city ticking. He also shot the only Egyptian pitmaster in Texas, with the greatest moustache to grace the pages of a magazine since 1976.

The more issues of Swill we publish, the more we learn. So much of putting together a publication like this is about trust, time and going ever-so-slightly limp. Less whiskey throttle, more velvet glove, as they say. Perhaps the best example of that is photographer John Laurie’s sweeping, magical look at the coast of Wales which we’ve had cooking for nearly six months. It’s a bit of a Britfest this issue, actually, between Molly Pepper Steemson’s essay on the posh lives of BBC darlings The Two Fat Ladies and my interview with Mighty Boosh actor and photographer Dave Brown, who plays everybody’s favourite shaman familiar, Bollo.

There’s also a clutch of incredible artists gracing the pages of issue five. Over in LA, artist Kristy Luck shows photographer Caitlin G Dennis around her studio, with words by Edwina Throsby. We take a look at late artist Dorothy Iannone’s extraordinary sexy life and were lucky enough to be granted permission to run some of the original pages from her 1969 cookbook – a painfully raw read for all the senstive souls out there. Back in Australia, photographer Cybele Malinowski captures the artist community of Hill End, where the mingling of food and art is life.

Back of house, Sean Moran talks to me about running one of Sydney’s most violent pubs (dead bodies and everything), before opening beloved Bondi Beach restaurant, Sean’s. Hospitality kingpin Con Christopoulos gives Anton Forte the four-one-one on creating an empire, and we tail Scopri’s Anthony Scutella on a Melbourne deli crawl. And, for your pleasure and ours, we’ve made a series of racy cocktails from a time when hair was huge and greed was good. Bottoms up.”