First Came Cake. Then Came Steak.

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First Came Cake. Then Came Steak.

The literary food magazine Cake Zine celebrated a savory special issue.

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A copy of Steak Zine on a table at Funny Bar on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

Credit...

Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York Times

By

Paul McAdory

Photographs by

Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet

April 29, 2026,

5:04 a.m. ET

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About 150 people gathered in Manhattan on a recent evening for the debut of Steak Zine, a special issue of the food-focused literary journal Cake Zine.

The cover, designed to resemble a perfectly marbled cut of beef, was red meat for the people in the crowd, who had paid $20 apiece to pack into

Funny Bar

, a steak restaurant and jazz bar on the Lower East Side.

“It’s trendy to like food again, even though Ozempic is here,” said Khuyen Do, the writer of a newsletter called

the Cakewalk

, who arrived toting a purse decorated with a plate, a fork and a knife.

Khuyen Do, center.

Cake Zine was founded in 2022 by two friends: Aliza Abarbanel, 30, a writer and former editor at Bon Appetit, and

Tanya Bush

, 29, a pastry chef and cookbook author. They enlisted Noah Emrich, 33, a designer who became an equal partner. In the debut issue, they described their publication as “a hedonistic exploration of history, pop culture, literature, and art through sweets.”

In its first seven volumes, Cake Zine stuck to cake, cookies, pie, candy, fruit and bread, giving contributors wide range for literary ruminations on the themes. The most recent issue included “a reckoning with orange soda” by Chris Crowley and “a deconstruction of the immigrant fruit-plate-as-love-language trope” by Giri Nathan. With Steak Zine, the editors asked writers to venture into savory territory.

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