It turns out David Chang’s Momofuku quarterly journal (cum iPad app), Lucky Peach, is not a one-off publishing project for McSweeney’s. Today comes word that Dave Eggers’s literary empire will launch a cookbook imprint this spring. The move is a follow-up to the successful food section that ran in a newspaper prototype McSweeney’s published in 2009, the San Francisco Panorama. Co-publisher Chris Ying headed up that project, and the response to it convinced him there’s “a market and demand for a more unconventional approach to cookbooks,” he told Publisher’s Weekly.
Lucky Peach will be the still-unnamed imprint’s first project, followed in June by Mission Street Food: Recipes and Ideas from an Improbable Restaurant, about the SF pop-up restaurant by the same name. According to a McSweeney’s publicist, the latter will be “a totally new take on the food book style, including recipes, instructions on how to run a profitable and charitable restaurant, and much more.” And the hatchling imprint is evidently on the lookout for future material! If they’re looking to do other cookbook spinoffs of “improbable restaurants,” we can think of a few of those.
McSweeney’s Launches Cookbook Imprint [Publisher’s Weekly]
Earlier: Momofuku Plans iPad App, Print Journal, and Possible Expansion
