From the Editor

It’s never been difficult to find creativity within the pages of our new food and drink bible, Stock & Barrel.

But sometimes it’s a challenge to decide how creative we should be, how much we should push the envelope of what a culinary magazine should be. By the time you’ve read through the whole issue, I think you’ll see which approach we embraced.

Or maybe it was already decided for us. Columbus refuses to be boring, so what choice do we have but to follow in its spirit?

You want recipes? Sure, we have those. But we don’t want to just help you whip up scrambled egg sliders at home—no, we want you to make meat cupcakes, and ceviche, and pair fancy French wine with carryout chicken livers.

This magazine is certainly a showcase for the creative talent toiling in the kitchens and behind the bar, ceaselessly innovating food and drink offerings around town, but you can’t have a dynamic scene like ours without plenty of curious customers willing to expand their horizons.

As readers (and eaters and drinkers), this is your tour guidebook, your checklist, and if we don’t mind saying so, a very different one than others you can find around the city (the fact we actually tattooed a slice of pizza on a living human for the cover shot should be illustrative of that).

Think of Stock & Barrel less as instructional and more as inspirational. Or aspirational.

This is your quarterly nudge to step outside of your tried-and-true menu items at your favorite joints—or to find a new joint altogether. Share your newfound knowledge and appreciation with a server or chef and let it guide you to new favorites; slip quietly into someone else’s beloved dive bar and become a regular.

Hell, while you’re at it, why don’t you tell us about those experiences? Our contributors have taken that cue from our subjects—and in some cases our subjects have even become contributors. That’s my favorite part about what we get to present to you in this magazine four times a year. The editorial staff of Stock & Barrel consists of eager culinary adventurers just like you, and we take pleasure and pride in going on the journey with you.

That can be an overused term at times, but “journey” is fitting. It’s much more about the experience than the actual endpoint. It’s more than profit, too; inside, you’ll see passion for food and booze, but you’ll also see people trying to establish legacies—whether it’s companies that have built philanthropy into their business models or a former cell phone salesman diving into the food truck world because he sees a chance for a new identity.

And it’s because of those people—our contributors and subjects—and you, the readers—that we have been able to embrace our identity as a publication, all the pieces melting together to form a composed concoction.

Just like any good recipe.

Cheers,

Travis Hoewischer, Editor-in-Chief

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