Eat me
New food magazine Fulgurances (which is the French word for ‘flashes’) is a heady mixture of food nerdery and humour. Fulgurances owns restaurants and wine bars in Paris and New York, and the magazine’s focus on food is informed, and intense (one excellent feature on Brooklyn fishmonger Vincent Milburn doubles as an earnest and informative manifesto for sustainable fish farming).
But there are also lots of lighter moments in this magazine. Like a full-page picture of a pudding that says ‘LOL’ on it. And a surreal comic strip about a person so obsessed with the smell of meat that she chases a slice of beef through a vortex into another world.
Taglined ‘The Almanac of contemporary cuisine’, Fulgurances has a deliciously thick plastic cover which creates the feeling that you are reading something very stylish and upscale, more like a book than a magazine. A particularly arresting feature is a series of photographs taken in Slovenia, following the chef and forager Ana Roš. In one double spread we see two images: the first of a dead deer; the second of a woman greedily scraping her plate. What the woman is eating is red, like the deer’s blood. It’s an unsettling juxtaposition.
My favourite feature is less provocative. Shot by Laurent Laporte (editor of Where Is The Cool?) this is a series of portraits of fishermen of Sanur. Each portrait spreads across two pages, so you have to flip the magazine around to properly look at them. But it’s the fishermen’s outfits — a pointed hat emblazoned with stars, sunglasses, a bejeweled ring — that are truly captivating.
