About
An independent food magazine for cooks who think with their eyes.
Cook and Design was founded in 2024 by Landon Brooks, a former product designer who could not stop cooking. We are a small, independent editorial team based in the United States, publishing slow, tested, beautifully written work about how Americans actually eat at home — and how we could eat a little better, a little more intentionally, a little more beautifully.
We exist because the food internet has become very loud, very fast, and very anonymous. AI-generated “15-minute miracles” flood every search result. Stock-photo chefs with fake white smiles populate every Pinterest board. We wanted to build the opposite of that: a magazine where every recipe is cooked at least four times before it goes online, where every photograph is taken in real daylight, and where every voice has a name and a face.
What we believe
Three principles guide every editorial decision we make.
Cooking is craft. We treat home cooking with the same respect a magazine like Wirecutter gives to product testing. Our recipes are developed iteratively, with notes, with failures, with a real understanding of what goes wrong. We do not publish recipes we have not personally cooked, and we do not republish other people’s work without genuine reasons.
Design is part of cooking. Founder Landon spent a decade as a product designer before turning to food, and that perspective threads through everything we do. The way a plate looks matters. The objects in your kitchen matter. The way a recipe is written — its structure, its rhythm, its visual editing — matters. We treat the page and the plate as equal craft.
Korean modernism is our compass. We are not a Korean cooking site, but a particular sensibility from Seoul informs our visual identity: soft pinks, deep navies, a love for negative space, the idea that restraint can be generous. You will see this everywhere on Cook and Design, from our typography to our photography to the way we plate a simple bowl of pasta.
Who writes for us
Cook and Design is a small editorial team. Beyond Landon, we work with rotating contributors — recipe testers, designers who happen to bake, cookbook authors with a story to share, food anthropologists, chefs we genuinely admire. Every contributor is named, paid fairly, and credited prominently. We do not publish anonymous “staff” content, and we never publish AI-generated text.
If you have a story you would love to write for us, or a recipe you have tested for years and want a serious home for, please get in touch. We answer every legitimate pitch within seventy-two hours.
How we make money
We are honest about it: Cook and Design is supported by a small number of carefully chosen sponsored partnerships, by affiliate links on the kitchen products we genuinely use, and by readers who buy something through our recommendations. We never publish a sponsored piece without labelling it clearly. We never recommend a product we have not actually used. And we never let a sponsor influence a recipe’s honest verdict — the cooking comes first, always.
Where to go next
The best way to get to know the magazine is simply to start reading. Our Recipes section is the editorial heart, Korean Food is where our visual DNA lives most fully, and Food News is where you will find our take on what is actually happening in the American food world right now. And if you want to write to us — a question, a correction, a pitch, just a hello — our Contact page is the door.