About Foodie Magazine

Foodie Magazine

Foodie Magazine is a Hong Kong food and drink magazine founded in June 2009 in Sheung Wan. It began as a free bi-monthly print magazine covering new restaurant openings, menus, dining pop-ups, seasonal recipes and visiting chefs, and published over 100 print issues, with its 108th and final print edition appearing in June 2020. Foodie relaunched with a custom-built website in 2015 and continues online at afoodieworld.com, delivering English-language food and drinks news, reviews, interviews, guides and events for Hong Kong's dining scene, including its annual Foodie Forks awards.

Foodie's own history page describes the magazine as having led in Hong Kong as a definitive source for food and drinks news, guides, features and interviews since its founding. From June 2009 to July 2020 it delivered its print magazine free to readers in restaurants and coffee shops all over Hong Kong; since then the brand has lived online, where it continues to roam the city, in its words, telling readers the best places to eat and drink in Hong Kong.

Founding in Sheung Wan in 2009

Foodie was founded in Sheung Wan in June 2009, a district then becoming one of Hong Kong's most fertile dining neighbourhoods. The first issue set the tone for the magazine's curiosity about the city's fast-changing food scene: it wrote about the opening of the Barbie Cafe in Shanghai and about Starbucks' very first "bing sutt" — its venture into the format of Hong Kong's traditional ice-room cafes. From the start, the magazine treated Hong Kong dining as a story of constant openings, experiments and collisions between local and international food culture.

The timing was apt. The decade after 2009 saw Hong Kong consolidate its position as one of the world's great eating cities, with international chef openings, a Michelin guide of its own and a restless local restaurant scene. A free English-language magazine devoted entirely to that scene — rather than covering food as one section of a general listings title — was a new proposition, and Foodie built its identity on that specialisation.

The free print magazine

Foodie appeared bi-monthly and was distributed free, found, read and shared in restaurants and coffee shops all over Hong Kong. The model placed the magazine physically inside the world it covered: readers picked it up where they ate and drank. Its content combed through the hottest new restaurant openings, the latest menus, cool dining pop-ups, seasonal recipes and visiting chefs, providing what the magazine calls vital foodie know-how.

Across eleven years the print run passed one hundred issues, ending with the 108th edition in June 2020. The magazine's history page records the print era with evident pride, noting the interviews and coverage accumulated along the way. In a market where many free titles lasted only a few years, a 108-issue run made Foodie one of the durable fixtures of Hong Kong's free magazine scene.

Chefs and interviews

Celebrity and working chefs were central to the print magazine's appeal. Foodie's own account records that it spoke to every top chef calling Hong Kong home: from Gordon Ramsay to Jamie Oliver, it interviewed the international names who opened in the city, and its covers featured figures including Heston Blumenthal, Nobu and chef Lau. The interviews were not only about famous visitors; the magazine's continuing coverage of Hong Kong's own chefs — its Foodie Forks retrospectives name chefs such as May Chow, Vicky Cheng, Nate Green, Uwe Opocensky, David Lai and Vinny Lauria among the talents its readers repeatedly honoured — built a record of the city's culinary generation.

Editor-in-chief Alicia Walker, who was with Foodie almost from its inception, embodied that institutional memory. Her retrospective on the Foodie Forks awards describes years of speaking one-on-one with readers and industry people through the magazine's events — a reminder that Foodie's authority came from presence in the scene as much as from print.

The 2015 digital relaunch

In 2015 Foodie relaunched with a custom-built website focusing on community content from its trusted readers, and the relaunch won several Spark Awards — the Hong Kong media industry awards. The rebuilt site shifted the brand's centre of gravity toward daily digital publishing: news, reviews, interviews, guides and events in Hong Kong's food and drinks scene, published continuously rather than bi-monthly.

The digital strategy leaned on community. Reader voting powered the Foodie Forks; reader gatherings powered its events; and the website presented itself as a platform for a food-loving crowd that knew what it was talking about. When print ended in 2020, the transition was therefore less a reinvention than a completion of a move begun five years earlier — the website had already become the brand's primary home.

The Foodie Forks awards

The Foodie Forks, the magazine's flagship annual event, celebrate the best of Hong Kong's dining scene. The awards were first created in the early 2010s — Alicia Walker, who was there when they were created, dates their creation to 2012 — and the first year's Best New Restaurant award went, by a landslide of reader votes, to Yardbird, a result she recalled as entirely expected given the restaurant's impact. The awards are voted for by Foodie's readers, which the magazine presents as their distinguishing feature: a dedicated, food-loving crowd deciding the winners.

The format grew over the years. Each year 40 Foodie Fork accolades are awarded across categories from Best Restaurant to Best Service Talent to Chef of the Year, with eight additional Foodie Recommended titles for venues worth a visit. The 2020 awards, held as the industry struggled, added a charitable mechanism: for every vote cast, Foodie donated HK$10 to two charity partners — Pei Ho Counterparts, the Sham Shui Po restaurant known for giving free rice boxes to those in need, and Feeding Hong Kong, which redistributes surplus food. After a four-year hiatus, the Forks returned in 2024 with a record 40 categories in their tenth edition, the ceremony held on 23 May; the 2025 edition followed, with 48 awardees revealed for Hong Kong's top restaurants, bars, cafes and chefs.

Secret Suppers and Foodie Club

Foodie's events programme extends beyond awards. Its Secret Suppers, started in January 2015, took readers to explore innovative private kitchens, remote food venues and new haunts around Hong Kong under a veil of mystery: a secret meeting location, with no details revealed until arrival. The format turned readership into participation — dining as an adventure shared with the magazine.

Through what it calls Foodie Club gatherings and its awards parties, the magazine maintained a face-to-face relationship with readers that its editor credited for the awards' meaning: speaking to readers in person, in an often impersonal digital age, built the mutual appreciation on which a reader-voted award depends. The events also kept the brand visible in the industry it covers, celebrating the achievements of restaurants and individuals for their cooking, their ethos or the atmosphere they create.

Food's Future Summit

Foodie also looked beyond restaurants to the future of food itself. It ran three award-winning Food's Future Summits, partnering with world leaders in food technology such as Just Food and Avant Meats. The summits positioned the magazine within Hong Kong's food-technology conversation, connecting its dining readership to questions of sustainability and innovation in how food is produced.

That strand of the brand's work distinguishes it from a pure listings title. Foodie's Hong Kong is not only a place to eat out; it is a city where new food products are launched, tested and debated, and the magazine worked to launch new products and support the city's restaurants within the same programme.

The end of print in 2020

The print magazine's run ended in June 2020 with its 108th edition. Foodie's history page marks the moment plainly: like every great story, its life in print came to an end. The magazine had published over a hundred issues distributed free across Hong Kong since July 2009, and its final print year coincided with a period of severe pressure on Hong Kong's restaurant industry, the very sector the magazine existed to celebrate.

The brand itself continued. The office returned to Sheung Wan, where Foodie had been founded in 2009, and the website carried on as the publication's home, with contributors and editors continuing to cover the city's dining scene. The print archive — the hundred-plus issues and their chef interviews and awards editions — remains the brand's founding monument.

Foodie online today

Today Foodie operates at afoodieworld.com as an English-language food and drinks platform for Hong Kong: news, reviews, interviews, guides and events, with the Foodie Forks restored as its flagship annual celebration. Its self-description remains unchanged in substance from the print era — the definitive source, in its phrase, for food and drinks news, guides, features and interviews in Hong Kong.

Foodie's trajectory — free print magazine in 2009, award-winning digital relaunch in 2015, print closure in 2020, digital continuation with its awards revived — traces the path of Hong Kong's independent magazine sector as a whole. What survived the transition is the brand's original asset: a specialised, trusted voice on the single subject of eating and drinking in Hong Kong, built over more than a decade and a hundred print issues.