*** Classing up a few coffee tables and pubs around town is this new Chinese food magazine called The Cleaver Quarterly, which takes the long and immersed view on the global phenomenon on Chinese cuisine, assembling an international cast of writers and contributors to discuss its varied manifestation all over the globe. Created by a few seasoned Beijing residents slash journalist-types, the magazine's mandate is to bring a long-format platform to the topic of Chinese food, collecting an international round-up of focal points and article varieties in a playful but passionate voice. Issue 1 hit the mail last week. Yes, a long-format start-up print magazine in the year 2014, the age of the internet meme. Dafuq? SmartBeijing got tipsy with two of the founding editors, Iain Shaw and Jonathan White, to discuss in depth this lucrative-ass idea. We went to Bob's Wine. Front row: The Cleaver founders Iain Shaw, Lilly Chow, and Jonathan White. Back row: Several hundred other things that are obsolete.

First Cuts

Might as well be, yeah.

Value for money. The weather is great in the summer. JW: Loads of dogs.

is about things that happen to everyone. They're not ready for it yet.

Iain. Talk slowly and tell him in great detail until he is bored. IS: Inside The Cleaver, you will find Chinese food from around the world presented in a manner of ways from info-graphics, to beautifully illustrated features, to long form writing, BUT no matter how it is presented, you will find it presented in a lively, fun-loving style.

Chinese food wherever Chinese food happens. JW: Chinese food… IS: ...from around the world. Chinese food has more or less found its way to all the corners of the globe. What we're trying to do is uncover interesting stories with Chinese food, wherever it has ended up, and tell them.

For example, it's not in this issue, but it's coming up, there is one Chinese restaurant in Kabul, Afghanistan -- the only Chinese restaurant in Afghanistan. There's a British fellow and he's got a Chinese wife, and they run this restaurant, and it's the only one there.

Makes it taste better [laughs]. IS: To bring it into perspective, one minute we're sending an email to this guy about his restaurant, and the next week we get an email back from him saying that there's been a bombing in a Lebanese restaurant around the corner from him, and everything is on lock-down. He's saying, "We all have to stay at home." That, for us, thinking we were doing a magazine about food, which is, you know, a leisurely topic everyone enjoys, getting an email like that gave us a bit of a pause for thought. But it also increased our interest in telling these sorts of stories.

The first issue, in terms of content, it's probably about a quarter of stuff coming from China. From domestic side. It's content on things based in the Mainland. And the rest from everywhere else. But that's about the ratio that we want to keep. There's so many stories that we've encountered, heard about, and we want to know more about… like the Chinese restaurant in Kabul. We've got a little bit of a lead about Chinese restaurants in North Korea. We've heard stories about African guys making tofu in Africa. JW: Yeah, there's a guy in Mali, I think. IS: Guinea.

Everyone's been very, very, very nice. No one has returned it yet. IS: No one's throw it down on the ground yet. The feedback's been pretty positive.

Size, Scope, and Audience

We're out four times a year. JW: For Issue 1, we started off with 1,000 copies. Hopefully, we'll have to reprint Issue 1. We'll see. Started off with a thousand, hopefully a bit bigger for the second one. For distribution, we're looking outside of Beijing. It's distributed across the world. We're looking at New York and London. It's interesting, the subscribers we've got now. Lots in Australia. Lots across Europe-wide. Several across America.

Yeah, very much. Every time I sell a magazine here, I'm a little upset. Like, that's great, that's fucking brilliant that someone wants to buy and read the thing, but it's very much aimed outwards.

To most of the people who bought it, they found it somewhere online. We've been hard on the Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. The old social media. I don't know exactly why or where they came from. IS: Big source of friends as well. We had a big Kickstarter campaign to fund the first one. The Kickstarter campaign, I think, helped solidify a bit of a network, but as Johnny says, the interest has come from all over. And I don't think we've even tapped the surface of the possible interest either. I think that's the next challenge, to really get into it. But we've found people that have told us "this is what we want", and we've been sending them out -- big pile to America, big pile to the UK. Little bit smaller, Canada, Australia quite a few. Europe, yesterday we sent a bunch. A few to France, Sweden, the Netherlands -- all over the place.

I don't have the internet...

Not really. The thing is, big media, big mainstream media, they are in a lot of trouble in many ways. The advertising has fallen out. However, if you look at the other side of it, the grassroots side of it, there's so many magazines that are just starting up over the last few years. There's many, many print magazines starting up dealing with specific subjects, like food, and there's several very successful ones. JW: Independent print magazines. IS: Independent print magazines. And these aren't weekly magazines. The weeklies and the monthlies -- that's the model that is being threatened with extinction. Quarterlies -- that's a kind of new thing. In terms of food, you've got like 20 to 30 that have started up in the last few years. Some have failed, yeah, but some of them are growing pretty rapidly. Aside from food, you've got cycling magazines and other sports. Niche subjects. The difference seems to be, the old model of putting all your cheaper magazine in a bunch of different places to reach everyone, and then sell advertising -- that model is being threatened. The new model seems to be, if we can build a community around this specific idea, this niche idea, and put out a quality product that people want, then we can build through direct purchases, events, and fostering this community. Now there are magazines about cycling, there's magazines about cars, there's magazines about motorbikes, and whatever, all started in the last few years, all dedicated to niche ideas. To put another perspective on it, take power tools. If you can build a value product dedicated to this niche, and you can find just a few thousand people around the world who value what you do, that's probably enough to sell an ad to Black and Decker.

Money and Motivation

Well, the first issue was ad-free for a reason. IS: We wanted to concentrate on making the issue as good as it could be. We wanted to spend time making the magazine good. The important thing is you want to build a brand to a point where if you are actually selling ads into that brand, you are in control and not them. That's why we didn't sell ads in Issue 1. We're looking into Issue 2 now and ads are still not a big thing for us. We're not anti-ads, but if you want to entertain the idea of selling ads, you want to be at a point where you can dictate the terms. JW: No advertorials. No soft coverage.

Unless we are penetrating them! [Complete and total silence.]

Lifestyle, service journalism. Whatever you want to call it.

Well, the reason I wanted to start the magazine, at the outset, and I'll be honest, I didn't want the last magazine I'd ever make to be The Beijinger. I just didn't want to do service journalism anymore. I mean, service journalism is great, to a point. There's a reason why they exist. There's a market for it and they serve a purpose, but you don't feel like a journalist when you're working at it. I mean I don't feel like a journalist now either…

Yeah, well, yeah. [Laughs.] It's just that long-form journalism is better. For me. I remember when Vice came out. I used to read Thrasher and Metal Hammer… IS: The thing was we'd done a lot of time making that kind of magazine and we were ready for a change. We were all intrigued by the prospect of doing something on our own and something that's different. And something that aimed beyond Beijing. Which, you know, if you're going to do that, it makes sense not to do that sort of service journalism. I would say it wasn't massively a reaction to what we'd done before, just a desire to do something different. We'd left The Beijinger and we were asking the question, can we do something on our own? Can we do something different? And I think to that degree it's a success. If you picked this up [The Cleaver], you wouldn't learn much about Beijing…

Yeah, there's all sorts of wanky titles…

Abso-fuckin-lutely. That's the best thing about it. Twatty headlines. IS: I'm disappointed when something I'm working on doesn't get to where it should because the headline isn't silly enough.

[Laughs.] Ill tell you mine now. It was a photo headline… I'm pretty proud of this… it was a photo, right, it was several black guys at the Shaolin Temple and I put... "Shaolin Brothers". IS: Right, I'm not that proud of this because too much time has passed and I've not bettered it. But this was a while ago. I was relatively unknown at The Beijinger, and they were looking for a headline for an article about the guy who was like the last eunuch. The last eunuch of the Imperial Court sort of thing. And it was all very reverent but… "Seedless Mandarin".

The guy who wrote it was very put out. [Laughs.]

Well, it's just everything. The variety. One day you go to a restaurant and you're eating some of the sweetest food ever, and then next day it's the spiciest food. You don't want to eat any more of it but at the same time you can't stop. It the diversity of experience of it -- experiences from the way it tastes in your mouth to the overall experience of atmospheres you can eat it in. Compare dim sum in Hong Kong -- you're getting served off these carts and it's the most relaxed thing you can do -- compare that with eating hot pot in Beijing on a Friday night at one, two, three, or four in the morning. And you're in the same country. That doesn't happen with too many foods. If you talk to a lot of Chinese people who manage to travel and see different parts of the world, a lot of Chinese people say how much they like different countries and seeing different types of peoples and places. Tthe one thing they always complain about when traveling abroad is the food. It's just not rich enough. That's something that fascinates me... If you live in Beijing, The Cleaver Quarterly can be ordered directly at thecleaverquarterly AT gmail DOT com. Or you can find it at The Bookworm. National and international readers, you can order the magazine right here. They can also be contacted through their Facebook link right here. All pictures with this article from the afor-linked Facebook page. That's how we do in internet land. ***