Alla Carta is a solid, good-looking, semi-annual journal on fine-grain paper. Since 2012, its Milan-based team has explored one of our most valuable goods: food. (Andrea Vigna, as Food Editor, has one of the most enviable titles in the publishing world.)
The elegant art direction, with its subtly washed-out pages, aims to subvert the conventions of the genre. The editors gather around a table of prepared dishes and coffee with their interview subjects. (In the latest issue: a member of the band Rhye, and the filmmaker Michel Gondry.) The cover features a cornucopia of fries spilling out onto a medieval forest painting. It could be seen as a radical attack on the classical—but it’s not: everything about Alla Carta is friendly.
The content is like a postprandial revery on a shady European terrace, the musings too metaphysical, and the images too pretty, to really require an answer. Let’s hope that Alla Carta stays on the table, a refuge for restless, hungry souls.
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