This week The Bristol Sauce turns two and we’re excited that it can now walk by itself and form basic sentences. But in all seriousness, these milestones are an opportunity to reflect and to plan.
In our two trips around the sun, we’ve published 170 articles and had 26 people write for us, with five more commissions on their way. All of those people have been paid for their work, and for many, it has been the first time they’ve written about food. That’s something to be enormously proud of. We have over 2,500 subscribers — a warm welcome to any that have joined us in the last week! (I promise we do normally publish restaurant reviews and funny columns, it’s just that this is a big anniversary. Normal service resumes on Thursday.)
I am very determined, but still the future holds a lot of uncertainty. My priority has always been paying our writers, so my own time is largely volunteered for free, which is unsustainable. The media landscape continues to be a shit show — corporate greed prioritising clicks over honesty does not a healthy newsroom make. The extremes of the political spectrum are doing their best to label the ‘mainstream’ media as untrustworthy, positing that ‘citizen’ journalists who post reels and are completely unregulated are the way to go instead. Big tech, too, are doing their utmost to take our attention away from thoughtful writing that could pose a threat to the establishment, instead distracting us with AI videos of animals at the Olympics or people filming without consent on deeply inappropriate Meta glasses. It’s not looking good.
Substack, which for a while looked like a veritable oasis in this binfire, has also gone down the pan. Despite the platform having been originally positioned as anti-advertising, Substack bestsellers can now apply for sponsorship deals. Oh and Andrew Tate is on here now, and he’s a bestseller. Not to mention the group of neo-Nazis making money from Substack newsletters too. We could get into a debate about free speech here, but I haven’t got the time. It’s not a platform I wish to be on any longer.
There are other platforms that do similar things to Substack, that will take a smaller cut of our revenue (which would be a great relief) and that would allow us greater control over our branding and content. But before we can migrate, we need to reach a critical mass, so that we aren’t cutting our foot off to spite our face when Substack itself drives a noteworthy portion of our traffic.
In the next year, we will migrate to a new platform and hopefully launch our first ever print magazine. You can spend all day reading the various arguments in the ping pong match of print is dead/print is back, but I want to try it. A printed magazine is beautiful and invites a kind of stillness that we don’t have enough of anymore.
There are substantial glimmers of hope on the horizon for food writing. The Financial Times is investing heavily in food writing and has a killer line-up of journalists. Vittles has expanded into print, and earlier this year hosted a food in print fair in London which exhibited 50 food publications and had thousands of people come to read and buy them. The Observer has just announced a new permanent restaurant critic after an 18 month interregnum (thank you Marshall Manson for teaching me a new word).
But it remains clear that the only way to run a publication with any sense of integrity in this current day and age is to have the readers pay for it. Any other funding method invites in greed and bias. If you like reading The Bristol Sauce, please help us get closer to that critical mass by becoming a paying Saucer. If you’re already one of our 180 paying Saucers, you’re a straight up legend.
The plan is very much to be around for decades to come; to entertain, to inform and to help you eat well — free of any bias, AI slop or dodgy dealings. Help us out by subscribing, telling your friends, sharing a link. Thank you.
The Bristol Sauce is an AI free publication — all our work is written and edited by humans.
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The Observer announced a new permanent restaurant critic who has no serious credentials as a food writer!
Two years! Congratulations. I'll be very interested in your plans for a print mag. As part of the forthcoming Brighton's Best brand renewal, the designer did a mock up of a stack of Brighton's Best Restaurants magazines and it made me think, I'd really like to make that a reality. The pic will be on the BBR Instagram on Friday if you are interested.