Nicky and Oliver run the delicious:days blog from their base in Munich. Their succulent mix of food, restaurants, gossip and Munchen has made the blog one of the most popular in Europe. Irakli West went to talk to Nicky about her approach to blogging.
Tell us more about yourselves, your blog and the way you work together. Who does what?
When I got to know Oliver, he didn’t own a pan, however, he had a well developed taste for good and expensive restaurants. After carefully introducing him to the joys of cooking and our first joint cook-offs (at the time he lived in Atlanta), a spark was lit. Today we’re having a clean demarcation line between his fortes (Asian cusine) and mine (ROW, rest of world).
I’ve always had a thing for cookbooks, whether the ones I’ve inherited from my grandma or the ones just bought off a bookshelf; alright, perhaps at an addictive level. Cookbooks and online research for new sources introduced me to the world of food blogs. Right of the start, I very much liked the notion of sharing one’s experiences – both good ones as well as not so good ones – which triggered my desire to have my own food blog.
Was it difficult to become a blogger?
With my design and Oliver’s technical background it was a quick and logical conclusion to combine our cooking adventures, a self imposed design standard and proper web technology to provide a visually attractive and informative blog. We started in March (this year) and it is and has been incredible fun to see this platform evolve, design-wise, content related as well as our rapidly growing readership.
In terms of who does what, everyone really does a little bit of everything: cooking, writing and photographing. While we both have different approaches to taking pictures using diverse angles and perspectives, we usually agree quickly on what qualifies and what doesn’t qualify for a post.
Why did you decide to write in English?
Our initial impression was that the German (food) blogsphere is still in its infancy, compared to for instance English speaking countries. Once we had decided to go ahead and make our contribution to the food blogsphere and because of the already established connections to other English speaking food bloggers, it was a straight forward decision to keep the blog in English.
In an attempt to bring the food blogging community closer together, despite any borders and barriers, we recently came up with the meme “The Cook Next Door” (similar to a questionnaire) that asked participating bloggers/cooks to share some personal information. The feedback has been amazing: more than 500 bloggers responded, the meme was translated into 5 other languages.
You have a more than respectable amount of readers. What do you think makes your blog so successful? How do you stand out from the crowd? How important is the design?
I think our blog is far from being picture perfect and we really don’t want it to be perfect either. We don’t follow a carved in stone roadmap nor do we feel any pressure to do certain things. This easiness helps us to be a bit more relaxed and this is hopefully relayed to the reader.
While cookbooks may only present perfect results (made possible by relentless food stylists & lots of fake food), delicious:days is a personal blog – it is us – documenting our culinary successes and failures, or in other words, what you see is what you get (and what we eat). I believe this is mainly what connects our readers to us. On an average day we’re counting 800-900 individual, unique web visitors with an additional readership of around 300 RSS readers.
Generally, the first thing that catches my attention is the design of a site, although it may not be a guarantee to whether or not I stay. If a site is clean and easy to read I’m much more likely to get past the first sentence, provided the content lives up to its promise. Design is important in the sense of making the blog pleasing to the eye. We attempt to keep a consistent design and message to support readability and simply make it attractive to read. The acknowledgement by our readers is a wonderful reward. The best thing about it though, is the fact I got to design it myself, choose its name, code it (with Oliver’s support), write it, and then publish it without a client interfering. It is sort of my playground.
You don’t believe in a person cult like, say, Jamie Oliver. Why?
Generally I believe in the fact that the higher you jump the deeper you can fall. If the person in the spotlight becomes more important than what he/she does to begin with, it can quickly grow old, if not become annoying. If articles in a food blog start covering two pages of yadah yadah, I tend to skip most of the text or simply don’t come back at all. Little anecdotes are entirely fine and really add the spice (no pun intended) to an article, but at the same time it should be apparent that you’re not taking yourself too seriously.
Can you describe “the making of” an article from beginning to the end? How do you decide what to write about?
I’m usually surprised at the articles that get the most attention, it’s virtually impossible to predict. Our basic ingredients are: Realism paired with honesty and pinch of tongue in cheek.
It’s all connected, different food brings up different memories and shopping for food can result in the most hilarious situations – all that has the potential of being included in an article – if worthy ;)
The making of a post is rather straight forward. Since we both love good food, we “maintain” a virtual list of dishes we want to cook and present at some point. Of course there is a certain dynamic and dependency on the season, current trends etc. The actual steps involved to a complete article are as simple as (1) decide on the dish/recipe (2), cook (3) document experience (takes more discipline than one could imagine) and produce photographs (4) Write up. We try to update delicious:days twice a week.
How do you produce such excellent imagery? Any tricks and recommendations?
As opposed to any speculations, we don’t own any special gear or camera. All pictures are taken in our kitchen, on our kitchen table. Proper lighting and exposure times are key – no surprises here. Since we only work with real daylight we’re somewhat limited in terms of our schedule.
Photoshop is only used for minor brightness/contrast adjustments, not for any artificial blurring of images whatsoever. Food photography oftentimes shows a level of blurriness, which for our taste is a little over the top, to an extend you start feeling dizzy after a second looking at it – let alone it’s sometimes not even physically possible and achieved through heavy post editing.
How involved is your readership? Do you fish (pardon the pun) for new ideas there?
The whole idea was to have a bi-directional communication. So we fully appreciate all the feedback we receive on our posts, whether it be positive, critical or suggestive. What we don’t do is piggybacking on ideas or concepts from other blogs. If we do run across an article of an acquainted blogger that depicts something we’ve cooked before in an equal or similar way, we postpone our own entry. On an inspirational level, however, we are completely open to influences from all around the world. We aspire to keep our entries unique; however, if we do seize a suggestion, we clearly credit the author, yet try to add our personal touch to it.
Your favourite cooking utensil?
Our KitchenAid. It is the most used kitchen device, a reliable and tireless friend – a must for anyone that is not thrilled about kneading dough day in day out. I’m simply too lazy. Oliver would have argued differently, his absolute favorite utensils are our kitchen knifes.
Thank You.
delicious:days
Originally published on trnd.
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