Food has always been in a rival to design for my heart. Needless to say, when I found out this week’s cover story was going to be on new restaurants, I was ecstatic at the opportunity to combine two of my passions.

After former photo editor Andrew Williams and I decided we wanted to shoot a food cover in the studio, I began the brainstorming. Since we featured ten restaurants, we had a lot of options to choose from.

I created some potential shot sketches so Andrew and I would have a plan once we had the food ready to photograph.

Our next task was to decide what food we wanted to feature. We wanted a variety of dishes that would be graphically pleasing on our square plates, colorful and delicious. Food from some restaurants was automatically out of the question:

Transporting frozen yogurt from Orange Leaf or Tasti D-Lite to the studio was out of the question. Other food simply would not look very appetizing on a magazine cover.

We shot brisket and coleslaw from Hickory Hills BBQ (featured on our table of contents this week), pad thai from Chim’s (featured on the cover) and tiramisu from Babbo’s. We had a lot of success with the food from Fulbeli’s and ended up photographing fish and chips, a cheeseburger, onion rings and cherry pie, three of which we featured on this week’s cover.

The final cover combines four plates, five hours in the photo studio and six hours of photo editing, typesetting and design. Dig in!