Juice, the Magazine

Most food magazines aim to be staid and upscale, with scarcely a Rolling Stone in the bunch--forget a Ben Is Dead or MaximumRocknRoll. But now, from Fred Dodsworth, a Berkeley dude who used to edit Beer: the Magazine, comes the brand new Juice, a minty-fresh, extremely art-directed magazine that aims to be more or less the Spin of food, pushing at the edges of cuisine. Here, if you want it, are a connoisseur’s guide to betel leaf, a feminist beer-drinking manifesto and a small masterpiece of choclo-autobiography from Cocolat’s Alice Medrich, who is to chocolate-lovers what Larry Flynt is to sad, lonely men in raincoats.

It likes to do what most food magazines don’t: run features that use the word “ain’t” a lot, eschew the use of those funny French phrases, and remind their readers a lot that the pretty ’93 Viognier the other guys wax rhapsodic about exist mostly to get you ripped. (That’s probably because where a magazine like, say, Bon Appetit supports itself with a lot of glossy ads from European tourist bureaus and companies that make $5000 refrigerators, Juice has mostly beer ads instead.)

Juice can swing a tad sophomoric--we could do without what may be Warren Hinckle’s 412th printed rant about the state of Irish whiskey, or the article suggesting ideal pairings of beer and firearms--but at least it tries to swing. Juice is available at newsstands; a subscription is $19.95 a year, from PO 9068, Berkeley, Calif. 94709.