The very first time Jonathan Nunn came to my attention was in February 2019, in the James Beard Award–winning online magazine *Taste Cooking*, under a headline guaranteed to catch my eye: “Sorpotel Runs in the Blood of Every Goan”. Here was bold, swashbuckling prose that was both entertaining and soulful, and I immediately recognized it was the best thing ever written about the deeply emblematic Goan dish born from 16th-century links to Africa and Brazil, which the young British Indian writer (he was not yet 30) accurately described as “nose to tail long before Fergus Henderson got to it”, and summarized with this lovely insight: “To this day I have never tasted a home-cooked sorpotel made by a man’s hand. It is a dish built on the blood and toil of women.”
I quickly followed Nunn’s biographical note to *Eater London*, the wonderful—but now sadly defunct—culinary city guide from Vox Media, where he had debuted just a few months earlier, and also reached out to connect with him via Twitter (now X) where @demarionunn was a constant, cheeky and irreverent thorn in the side of the mainstream UK culinary media. His free-flowing online commentary was consistently hilarious, but also hit hard in significant ways, as when he pointed out “more pasta restaurants were reviewed in the UK this year than Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Chinese, Korean, Thai, Japanese, East and West African and Caribbean restaurants combined”. This was Nunn’s first significantly influential breakthrough, as he described to *The Fence* magazine in 2020: “The British food media likes to think of itself as diverse and egalitarian whereas it’s actually nothing of the kind. It pays lip service to diversity, it’s often classist, fatphobic and reactionary, and if it’s not harbouring actual racists, it’s making unconsciously racist editorial decisions that reflect its biases.” And then, in instantly impactful ways, he went on to demonstrate how a much better food media can and should function, initially from under his own byline (initially mainly, but not only at *Eater*) with an extraordinary, exuberant series of maps and guides celebrating great food from an incredible profusion of London locations that had been effectively invisible, an entire landscape that had somehow remained hidden in plain sight. Nunn had already brewed a tumult when the pandemic shut down the world, and that is when he set up “Vittles”—vittlesmagazine.com—the compulsively interesting and well-conceived online newsletter that says “we think about food as economy, class, inheritance, and political agency, rather than just a dish on a table” and aims “to expand and enhance the journalistic and literary scope of writing about food by featuring original and new ways to think about cooking, eating, and domestic lives”. This remarkable publication “based in the UK and India” also insists on fair compensation for labour—an extreme rarity in itself—while entirely supported by user donations and subscriptions (at ₤5 per month, or ₤45 for the year). In what seems like a blink of an eye, every serious food person I know around the world has become its fan. As the great genre-bending Toronto-based lawyer turned writer (and five-time James Beard award winner) Naomi Duguid told me, “Vittles is a game-changer, and doubly refreshing because it’s delivering fine-grained solid reliable storytelling in a sphere that only rarely used for this kind of serious reporting. I find the effort exhilarating, and If I lived in London I’d be travelling each week to try to get acquainted with at least one or two of the places it tells us about.” IN THIS WAY, at very high speed, Nunn’s politics have become hugely influential far beyond the ambit of food writing, and brought him an unusual degree of crossover celebrity, along with very public A-list fans like Nigella Lawson, and even an impressive early-career profile in *The New Yorker*, which pronounced, “it is arguable that no one has ever really done this before—and certainly not with such impact or in such a short period of time”. For myself, I would go one step further: By showing us the city as it actually lives, breathes and eats, Nunn has given us an unusually persuasive way to understand what has been happening to our societies in the neoliberal age. As he writes in the introduction of *London Feeds Itself*, a superb compilation of essays he edited for the educational charity Open City—recently republished by the uber-cool Nobelist-laden Fitzcarraldo Editions—his interest is “in what restaurant writing might look like if it was not allied with PR, profit and property speculation, or anchored to hierarchies of taste forged by colonialism”. This elementary statement of purpose makes so much sense it begs the question why none of us were doing this in any systematic way before Nunn came on the scene. The one person I recall who was leaning in that direction was Krishnendu Ray, the India-born scholar who heads the NYU Food Studies PhD programme, in essays and books like the excellent 2016 *The Ethnic Restaurateur*, who told me he started following Nunn almost exactly the same time as I did: “He showed up at a talk I was giving at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies) in January 2019, the usual, insider, academic talk on rethinking the aesthetic dimensions of street food, the kind of thing that rarely garners any attention outside the ivory tower. Yet Jonathan showed up and was fully engaged. I was intrigued—who is this guy? Why is he interested in such esoteric insider conversations? So I started following him and came to realize that he is a rare bird who could take serious critical thinking and turn it into something insightful for an audience outside the academy, by shaving it of its pinched over-cautiousness. He was turning thoughtful but wordy criticism into something glamorously insightful.” Ray is the greatest power-consumer and analyst of food media I know, and says Nunn and Vittles have “dismantled the central problem of gourmand food writing in the Western world, distilling the preciousness out of that kind of food writing, its racism, its Eurocentrism, its swaggering masculinity, and unalloyed disdain for the tastes of other classes, races and ethnicities. Reading that writing, you would think only rich, white, European men—mostly French, English and Italians, maybe some Russian Tsars—knew what to eat and how to eat it. That presumption has defined so much of food writing, in particular restaurant reviews, since its invention in 19th-century European cities. Nunn and his colleagues turn that 200-year-old script on its head—taking us to working class pubs and neighbourhoods of colour, often far from the metropoles of the West, that would have filled the minds and palates of aspiring upper-class restaurant critics with incomprehensible panic. They play with that panic, and, in the process, they are drawing attention to the food of nearly 2 billion South Asians that rarely shows up in any lists and guides such as the World’s 50 Best Restaurants or Michelin. As a result, they are throwing some light on the illiteracy, insider judgements, and racketeering involved in the making of and fawning over such lists.” IT’S A VERY GOOD analysis. London is the main identity of Vittles, yet there is something decidedly South Asian in its all-devouring appetites and swagger, in the same continuum as the classic novels about the immigrant experience by Sam Selvon and Hanif Kureishi, which reveal the subaltern city in unexpected and illuminating ways. Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to meet—and eat—with Nunn on his home turf in North London, and asked him directly about this distinctly desi approach, and he told me that it came from his mother’s family (they are Goans who migrated to the UK from Nairobi). “My entire attitude to food was passed down through my Goan side and formed at the church hall, where my extended family used to cook for family functions. I think there’s a kind of omnivorousness that Catholicism instils in you—it’s the only religion I know of where its idea of fasting is to have fish and chips on Friday. And so we grew up on that repertoire of Goan and East African home cooking—stews and ugali, chilli fries, and all of that—and celebration food, like sorpotel, but also anything my mum found interesting or learnt from other women at church. I have no love for the church, but I do think being in a space where you have people from different cultures who wouldn’t necessarily meet otherwise, bound by this one shared belief, informs how I try to write about London.” On the flip side, says Nunn, “I think there’s an inherent limitation in only being able to grapple with your identity through food, and I think it leads to a huge amount of self-indulgent, solipsistic food writing that centres the second-generation diaspora experience and is disconnected from any historical and present-day struggles. I don’t want to write in silos or about silos. Having one parent who was born here and then one parent who chose it also gives me this sense of being inside and outside at the same time, and a permission to write about anything that interests me rather than just sticking to my heritage. I would really hate to be a writer who just wrote about Goan food or their family all the time [but] one of the other reasons I don’t write about Goan food often is because I know, in my heart, that I don’t know enough to do it justice and that it’s not enough to simply eat the food as a substitution for engaging with the culture. Over the next few years, I’d love to finally visit Goa and Kenya and be able to write about that part of my life without it being bound to my limited experience of it from London.” (Note: this essay is not online, due to licensing issues over one of the photographs)
