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Introducing: Bitten magazine. Essential nutrients, with a northern twist.

By on September 23, 2014
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Sorry we’ve been so quiet lately. We’ve been working very, very hard on a new project - and we’re proud and pleased to say it’s now out in the world.

What is it?

Bitten magazine is a brand new food and drink magazine for people who eat and drink. Made in the North, with love.

From road trips to back-yard bakeries, food slams to farm shops, we’ll be offering smart advice, immersive photography and expert reporting on food, design, style and travel. Practical ways for us all to step out of the weekly routine, and to see, hear, feel and taste the world around us. And not a restaurant review in sight: food and drink is way more interesting than that.

Bitten will seek out the region’s best producers, providers and personalities - working with a team of truly great writers, home economists and photographers.

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Why are you doing it?

Remember Almanac? We adored doing it - exposing the best bits of stuff going on in Liverpool - but we overestimated it. The city didn’t move at the kind of pace where we could fill a magazine every month, and keep it full of quality.

With Bitten, we’re really excited to be spreading out. To bridge the gap between Manchester and Liverpool. To encourage people to drive into the wilds of Lancashire and North Wales. To really go beyond our comfort zone and to find the incredible within our corner of the country. We’ll feature in-depth profiles of the region’s vibrant food and drink landscape: from farm to table, trawler boat to restaurant, as well as selective coverage on the stuff that makes our free-time fun. Retail, art and culture, travel and entertaining at home. Essential nutrients that keep all our senses working overtime.

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For too long, the cities and towns in the north have been pitted against each other, but Bitten is out to join the dots between them, to finding the likeminded people and places both within the city we call home, and just down the road. From Liverpool across to Leeds, Carlisle down to Conway. It’s a magazine that’s curious, inquisitive, and excited about what’s going on right now. And what connects our stories? Passion.

Bitten isn’t about food as fad; drink as fashion. It’s about the constants: real people, driven by a passion to bring something amazing into the world. Butchers. Bakers. Bartenders. Real ale makers. It’s about reconnecting to the stuff we consume in an intelligent, curious, celebratory way.

And it’s driven by an honest desire to go off grid and bring home the bacon.

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Isn’t print completely dead though? You’re insane.

Nope. Print has always been our first love, and independent magazines are thriving nowadays - take a look at Stack, or Magculture, to see the kind of amazing indie publications out there. They’re the ones pushing the boundaries, rather than their web counterparts. We’re much more interested now in immersive, long, engaging reads - stories that are perfect for a hold-it-in-your-hands print product like Bitten. We hope, in future, to move SevenStreets more in that direction - like you, we’re totally sick of cut and paste clickbait churnalism of the blog world.

Alright, whatever. Tell me about the first issue.

There’s a feature on Tebay, and the story behind the family that single-handedly reinvented the service station. There’s a photo essay on a night in the Lobster Pot, Liverpool’s most famous chip shop. An interview with Northwest super chef Mary-Ellen McTague. A visit to Hebridean hideout Tiree, and a meet-up with a man who explores caves. A how-to guide to smoking meat, cooking with blood, tips on tequila, and getting involved with shellfish. A directory of 50 of the best butchers in the Northwest. And lots, lots more.

For our first issue, we’ve gone for a double cover: one of boxer Paul Sass (above), and one with the Tebay cover story (main image). Keep an eye out for both.

I hate paying for magazines.

You’re in luck then, because Bitten is free. Currently bimonthly, we’ll be sending over 20,000 copies to shops, restaurants, cafes, food hangouts across the Northwest over the next few weeks. If you can’t find a copy, send us a tweet or drop us an email and we’ll point you in the right direction. Likewise, if you’ve got a place that wants to stock it, let us know and we’ll send you some. It’s your magazine as much as ours.

I’ve got something you might be interested in.

We’d love to hear from you. If you know of something that would fit in Bitten, and that would get us (and you) excited, email us.

Are you on social media?

Duh, of course. Follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, or follow us on Instagram.

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  • Ramsey Campbell

    Sounds good to me!

  • Branston Pickle

    I’d this coincidence or are you trying to get in before my own similar publishing venture is launched?

    CAN YOU SWALLOW THIS…..MAYBE BUT CHEWITT FIRST!

    If you walked into Curry’s electrical store to buy a cappuccino maker with bean
    steamer, you’d expect to have it boxed or maybe bagged up to take it home with
    you. You wouldn’t try and swallow it and carry it about inside you until it was
    digested and the remnants evacuated. Ooohhhh, should have taken the plug off!
    But we do just that when buying something from a restaurant. That’s placing a
    lot of trust in their product.

    And that’s the starting point for our straight talking venture, about food and
    the people who eat it.

    GIVING YOU THE FIRST SHOUT

    On your behalf, we’ll be dropping in on the best and maybe the odd beast. And
    that’s why we want to boast about our new on-street magazine. CHEWITT!

    I’m sure like me, you are sick of the giveaway magazines and the slap and dash
    blogs.

    That’s why we will be shouting our reviews in the street, to
    people at bus stops, cashpoints supermarket queues and the stallholders at
    Paddy’s Market. People like you. Shouting in the street has always been our
    first love. We’ll be saying F*ck a lot too and f*cking only WITHOUT THE
    “*” because WE MEAN IT! But while we mean it, that doesn’t make us
    mean., far from it, we want to heap praise on those places who deserve it. And
    so many do but you never hear about it….well now you F*CKING will (see told
    you)

    EXPECT OR RATE

    So will it be any good? What can you expect from our stable of previous
    ventures?

    Well we’ve just cleaned out the stable so there will be plenty of that

    How will we rate things for our listeners?

    Well if we really think you just gotta go check this out, we will poke you
    while shouting. 20 POKES is basically
    heaven on earth…and then some.

    1 POKE is okay for the plebs but they wouldn’t be reading or listening anyway.

    They are probably down Paddy’s Market buying……..things..whatever they have
    there

    AND WE NEED TO SUPPORT THOSE F*CKING STALL……I MEAN WE NEED TO F*CKING
    SUPPORT THOSE STALLHOLDERS. BECAUSE WE
    AT CHEWITT ARE DOWN WITH THE PEOPLE AND WE GO THERE FOR OUR…

    ……….STUFF.

    SO LETS GET GOING….LET’S START CHEWING.THE FAT! Yikes,
    well it is called CHEWITT…….although once a year we will be having a
    special year long roundup called
    F*CKING CHEWITT. (done it again!!! The F word!!!!!!!!!)

    WANT A TASTER?

    NO

    Good! because we have been at it already and we have news
    that will put a rocket in your salad bowl. On the frayed edge of Liverpool
    Ropewalks is a new Thai eatery…hold on…we know….Thai is so 90s…even the
    Thais don’t eat it now but hold on!
    This is Thai with a twist! For a
    while, these places were populated by the semi-detached suburban dwellers who
    not only had a garden full of pampas grass, but once a month they had a mouth
    full of lemon grass. Whether it was a red one or a green one, Thai was the
    thing. But red and green went way off
    scene some time in the noughties…as we at CHEWITT like to call them. Well
    it’s back! And it’s back to the traditional because the Thai Mei Kan Goru down
    in Ropewalks is nothing like any Thai restaurant you have ever been in. And
    that’s a promise!

    Well with that promise in mind, here’s what we found on our
    first visit.

    Starters: Prawn Cocktail with 1000 island dressing. An
    interesting combination of prawna, as the name suggests, so we were not
    disappointed there, and what seemed to
    be a light crisp lettuce that got soggier towards the bottom of the novel glass
    in which it was served. Throughout the
    glass a rather piquant creamy sauce
    (complimenting bathed the cooked prawns (cold by the way…but it’s
    meant to be) had almost taken on their colour. The prawns are supplied already
    peeled by YOUNGS one of the best fish people in the country and brought in
    directly from Iceland. 15 pokes from me
    on this

    But only 9 from my companion, who was disappointed that
    there were no crabsticks.

    Hardly a cocktail if it’s just prawns, she said.

    For main course we both plumped for the fish and boy were
    they plump. A square of cod each, with me opting for the Butter sauce while my
    companion took the more dangerous Parsley. A nice touch of personal service and
    a bit of entertainment as the Thai waiter, Geoff, brings the two dishes to the
    table, takes a pair of scissors from his top pocket and with just a couple
    of lightening snips empties the bags
    onto the plates. But he doesn’t just whisk the bags off to the bin, there is
    nothing wasted here. he rolls each bag into a tube shape and starts to suck out
    the remaining sauce from each one. Bit of theatre never goes amiss and once
    we’d seen the technique he passed them over to us and we got every drop of that
    smooth cream from the polythene.

    The cod itself was a bit on the watery side for the most
    part but some nice chewy bits here and there.
    Some odd looking brown bits on the fish but I expect that’s why you get
    the suace to hide them. All in all a good 11 Pokes for the fish and 2 more for
    the sucky bag!

    The side dishes that came with the fish were too far away
    for us. It’s a large dining room and they were a good twenty feet away on the
    left hand side, so we only got up twice
    before deciding that was enough. But had they been closer, we would have
    enjoyed An Bessai Roste Potato and Birds Thai Peas.

    But it was the list of deserts that made the night. A real
    East Meets West

    After a meal like that you don’t want a Tornado blowing you
    out of your seat, but you might want a Twister! Well blow me, that’s just what
    we got. a kind of ice cream and ice lolly combo that came in three colours
    green, cream and pink, forming a twisting pattern almost like a spiral from the
    green ice twisted around the cream ice…cream and hidden inside going right
    through a further layer of pink that surrounded the stick.

    My companion was clearly envious and offering me a lick of her mivvi if she
    could sample my twister……what I said…a two colour mivvi for a bit of my
    three colour twister? F*CK OFF! HOW MANY POKES? Well we may have to change
    the maximum you can give because this was beyond POKE and the great thing was, you could keep the stick…..well I’ll
    be sticking with this place for a while!

    F*CKING FABULOUS

    So there you have it folks…our first review in the bag…just like our cod!
    YIKES!