What is The Pantry 204?

The Pantry 204 is an online platform that celebrates the UK food industry. We bring together recipes from cookbooks, blogs, newsletters, restaurants & personal projects from people across the industry in one place, and in doing so we hope to inspire you in the kitchen and to encourage a slower, more considered and mindful approach to food.

We're selective in the recipe content that we share, and we're committed to highlighting the people behind those recipes and the work that goes into creating them. As we build our library of recipes and stories, we hope to support the talented individuals and small businesses that make our industry what it is, to celebrate creativity and diversity, and to emphasise the importance of seasonality and the environment in our cooking and food choices.

Where does the content on the site come from?

The content on the site has been shared and brought together as a result of generous contributions and permission from food writers, photographers, stylists, restaurants and cookbook publishers. We initially set out to inject love into cookbooks that so often end up sitting on shelves, and many of our recipes are samples or excerpts from cookbooks. We really encourage you to buy them to delve deeper into the author and their style of cooking, and to feel that wonderful feeling of a beautiful cookbook in your hands.

We also share many recipes from individual blogs, newsletters and e-books from those who perhaps don't yet have cookbooks or aspire to have them one day. We wanted to make it easy to find and discover the projects that many food writers, stylists & photographers undertake in their own time. You'll always find the links to the original source and ways to find from that author at the bottom of each recipe or story, and on their profile too.

Can I contribute to the site?

We're always looking to add to our recipe collection and our stories. If you've got a cookbook, personal project or blog that you'd like to have featured on the site, please get in touch. We'd love to say hi, and we genuinely want to celebrate the incredible talent in our industry and give emerging, younger talent a space to publish their work alongside those who are a little more established. We've worked in the food world for a little while, so we know how difficult it can be to get your work published or get your name out there.

I'd love to contribute but I don't have any imagery of my work. Can you help?

We'd love to. You may have noticed we love doing recipes justice by having a big emphasis on great food photography, so this is our jam. Whilst we know it's not all about what your food looks like, we believe good food photography can often make recipes more accessible. There's also a whole side of the industry dedicated to creating food imagery — art directors, stylists and photographers — and we want to showcase their work.

We openly care about the images that accompany our recipes, but we don't want that to be a barrier to sharing valuable work on our site. So we gave our side hustle a side hustle, called Studio 204. We've got years of experience working in food styling & photography and each month we set aside time to style and photograph recipes for those who don't have them or would like them for their portfolio.

We're also working on creating a system whereby young and emerging food writers, stylists and photographers can come together to create, so do get in touch if that sounds like something you'd be interested in being a part of.

I don't write recipes, can I still contribute?

Definitely! We're all about telling all kinds of food & travel stories. If you've got an idea or a burning desire to write about a topic that you truly love, just drop us a line and we'll see what we can do.

Is everything on the site credited?

Every recipe, story and image we share is fully credited, and we make a point to ensure that's the case. Whether it's the head chef of a restaurant or a styling assistant on a shoot, we want their name up in lights.

If ever you spot something that's not right or you've seen a pal's name is missing where it shouldn't be, just drop us a line and we'll fix it right up. The profiles we create for the contributors and creatives are, however, dependent on whether that individual has given us permission to have a profile on the site, so that might be why some aren't there.

Are contributors paid?

For the moment, this is simply a passion project that highlights and brings together the work that the wonderful people in our food industry are doing. We want to get people cooking from cookbooks that were released one, two or five years ago, and to discover the projects that writers and creatives do in their own time. There's a lot of work that goes on behind the scenes and we're working on way to grow the project sustainably and fairly.