Kerry Diamond was working at Coach and had just opened a restaurant called Seersucker in Brooklyn with her boyfriend when she noticed something that should have been obvious: there were extraordinary women everywhere in the food world — chefs, bakers, restaurateurs, winemakers, food stylists — and the media was not giving them their due. She had originally conceived of a magazine as a project for the restaurant, an annual publication in lieu of a cookbook. She needed someone who knew how to make one. That person was Claudia Wu, whom she had met years earlier at Harper's Bazaar. Wu had started her career at Visionaire and V on a staff of ten, later founded her own design firm called Orphan, and had published Me, an indie magazine guest-edited by a different creative star each issue. What began as a restaurant side project quickly became something larger.
In 2013, Diamond and Wu launched a Kickstarter campaign that raised over $42,000 — enough to print the first issue of Cherry Bombe. The name, Diamond has said, just popped into her head one day: a firework, a pretty French dessert, a kickass girl-group song. Put that in a blender and you have the magazine. The debut issue featured Karlie Kloss on the cover, shot by fashion photographer Jennifer Livingston, and by 2014, each issue was selling around 10,000 copies. The aesthetic was deliberately fashion-forward — both founders had spent their careers in fashion publishing, and they brought that visual sensibility to food media, producing a magazine that Nylon would describe as proof that Diamond and Wu were leading a bona fide movement to change the way women are represented in the food world.
The publication grew into a media ecosystem. In 2014, they launched the Cherry Bombe Jubilee, an annual conference celebrating women in the culinary world that sold out its first year and has since expanded to multiple cities. Radio Cherry Bombe, a weekly podcast on the Heritage Radio Network initially hosted by writer Julia Turshen and later by Diamond herself, filled the airtime between issues. In 2017, they published Cherry Bombe: The Cookbook through Clarkson Potter, collecting recipes and stories from 100 women in food — Mashama Bailey, Christina Tosi, Padma Lakshmi, Chrissy Teigen. The book was praised by everyone from Goop to the Wall Street Journal.
Wu once noted that when she was growing up, there were no alternative, indie food magazines at all. Food magazines might be the new fashion magazines, she suggested — and Cherry Bombe, with its bubblegum-pink covers and its refusal to separate sustenance from style, proved her right. The magazine has never been about teaching women how to cook. It has always been about celebrating the ones who already do, and building the community that connects them. That community — the self-styled Bombe Squad — turned out to be larger, louder, and more loyal than anyone expected.
Explore Cherry Bombe at <a href="https://cherrybombe.com/" target="\_blank">cherrybombe.com