Ben Mervis studied medieval history in Glasgow and London before going to work at Noma, the Copenhagen restaurant that reshaped how the world thinks about Nordic cuisine. He later became a researcher and industry expert for Netflix's Chef's Table documentary series — a job that took him into kitchens around the world and deepened his conviction that food is the most honest lens through which to understand a city's culture. In 2017, working from Glasgow, he launched Fare: a biannual magazine that devotes each two-hundred-page issue to a single city, explored entirely through the intersection of food, history, and community.
The first issue took on Istanbul. Working mainly with local writers and photographers, Mervis and his team documented the fishermen and shopkeepers, the backstreet kitchens and market stalls, the forgotten histories and the dishes that keep the city moving. The approach was deliberate: no tourist lists, no restaurant rankings, no large museums or monuments in sight. Instead, Fare lets a city's locals do the talking and produces what one reviewer called a spiritual successor to the cult food magazine Lucky Peach. Subsequent issues have explored Helsinki, Charleston, Seoul, Glasgow, Taipei, Marseille, Mexico City, and more than a dozen other destinations.
Roughly the size of a hardback novel, printed on mixed stocks of high-quality paper, each issue of Fare is designed to be a timeless keepsake rather than a disposable guide — something you read for the stories as much as the food, and return to long after the trip is over. As Mervis once put it: you can only call two cities similar if you're not really looking at them.
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