Nick Muncy grew up in Seal Beach, California, wanting to be an artist. He redirected that impulse into the kitchen, graduated from the Art Institute with a degree in Culinary Arts, and spent two years at the Fairmont Hotel in Newport Beach before a move to Healdsburg's Cyrus, where he learned the foundations of pastry under Roy Shvartzapel. After a stint at José Andrés's The Bazaar in Los Angeles, he returned to the Bay Area to work at Saison, then followed pastry chef Matt Tinder to Daniel Patterson's Coi, where Muncy took over as executive pastry chef in December 2013 and earned a James Beard semi-finalist nomination.
After five years at Coi, Muncy left — not to open a bakery but to start a magazine. Toothache was conceived, as Muncy tells it, after dinner services with industry friends, primarily during last call at dive bars. The complaint was always the same: food media was produced by people who did not live and breathe kitchen life. The articles were written for home cooks and foodies, the recipes in cups and tablespoons, the photographs beautiful but bloodless. Muncy wanted to give chefs a blank page and let them fill it with whatever they wanted — their stories, their recipes in professional measurements, their photographs, their truths about what the life actually feels like.
The first issue was entirely self-published, with Muncy handling writing, editing, photography, and production. By issue three, Albert Adrià of elBarri, Gabriela Cámara of Cala, and Melissa King were contributing. The big uncoated pages gave the magazine a physical sturdiness that matched the kitchen culture it documented — the kind of publication that could survive having floury fingers on it. The recipes were unapologetically professional: no conversions for the home cook, no substitutions for supermarket ingredients. If you could not source high-bloom gelatin or high-acyl gellan gum, you were not the target audience.
After releasing five issues, Muncy returned to the kitchen as executive pastry chef at Michelin-starred Michael Mina in San Francisco, proving that Toothache was never a career pivot but a creative outlet — the artist in him finding paper when sugar was not enough. The magazine remains one of the most honest publications in food media: a document of kitchen life made by the people who live it, conceived at the hour when the dining room is dark and the only honest conversations happen.
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