Behind The Name: Why 'Chip Paper' and why not 'GastroGays'?

We spent a decade building a recognisable one-word 'brand name', so why didn't our dumb asses use that for our Substack? Let us divulge...

We have built a pretty successful content creation brand, bit by bit, over the last decade called GastroGays, so why didn’t we leverage that name in some way when setting up this Substack three years ago? Let’s delve into how ‘Chip Paper’ as a title came about…

Welcome to another long-read on Chip Paper, from Patrick Hanlon and Russell Alford. Chip Paper is our space on Substack where we share long-form food writing features, deep dives, snappy travel guides and recipes, all punctuated by hand-drawn illustrations. We started as bloggers, built our brand on Instagram and are now freelance food and travel writers plus the restaurant critics for The Sunday Times Ireland. We’re also over at gastrogays.com.

The moniker we’ve gone by since 2013 may have helped this channel grow far faster due to the name recognition but GastroGays - however good the title has been to us - has not always afforded us positive opportunities. Something we have discussed here and there before, and will continue to, but so often we’re typecast or pre-judged about who we are or what we do because of that name. Not being taken seriously because the name is considered gimmicky, subtle prejudice and homophobia, assuming all our food content has a gay agenda… the list goes on, so we do say it has helped and hindered us in equal measure.

Substack was an exciting new platform allowing us to refresh our approach to writing and embark on a fresh start, so it needed a new name to go alongside .

Our plan was always that this was going to become the home of our long-reads and personal essays, in response to a world that kept forcing our hand towards snappy social media captions, highly-styled photography and video editing. We had so little time to actually write when all our passion lay in communicating at length through the written word and connecting deeper with an audience in the process. We’re writers, first and foremost, and have always considered ourselves that — though most ring fence us as Instagrammers or, worse, influencers, because of the necessity to produce visual content over the last number of years.

Our Ongoing Strategy: Catchy Titles

GastroGays was born from a bottle (or two…) of wine in late 2012/early 2013. In our early twenties and eager to expand our experience, we were trying to be clever and creative in finding a catchy name to sum up our joint escapades in food. We will go to the grave arguing over who came up with the name — if you have ever seen Romy & Michelle’s High School Reunion it’s very “I’m the Mary, you’re the Rhoda”.

We’ve actually done similar two times since then, too. We presented and produced a food podcast for five seasons called Chew The Fat (until Covid got in the way, decimating our income and opportunities and restricting travel when our product was in-the-field — we then had to go back into full-time employment to survive) and when we were starting Substack we had also just signed off the final version of our debut cookbook, Hot Fat, a name we fought for that was super unconventional, bold and blatantly risky for a debut.

So, in the spirit of coming up with three catchy titles - GastroGays, Chew The Fat, Hot Fat - our Substack needed to fit seamlessly as fourth in the stable.

Fat has seemed to naturally follow us and underline our work. The glorious flavour-carrying lipid, unapologetic, in your face, often misunderstood and frequently weaponised, it felt like it suited us. Fat can be challenging and we like a bit of challenging the status quo, so it stuck. We wanted something to complement, though, rather than copy, those other names. Since we had a cornet of frites on the cover of our book and a slab of steak as the icon for our podcast we felt something around chips or frying or beef dripping might be suitable.

We ventured back in time.

Rewind: Chip Paper Existed Before… Kinda

When we lived in London we loved reading round-ups of where all the restaurant critics were eating each week, mostly because at that time we couldn’t keep up ourselves and didn’t really know the lay of the land as recent emigrants. It was a neat way to track where was (or wasn’t) covered, what the collective surmising of the cut of a place’s jib was and what the must-try (or must-avoid) dishes were.

Code Hospitality always listed the critics’ columns in their weekly bulletin (probably still our favourite email in our inbox every week) and the likes of

Ed Smith

used to trace all the recipes in the various weekend newspaper supplements in his newsletter Supplemental (later retired but now revived on Substack since earlier this year). These days Andy Lynes does a stellar job of digesting the critics’ dispatches on his Substack,

Smashed

.

After we moved back to Ireland we thought for a while about applying that to the Irish scene. We planned it in 2018 but took until early 2019 to free up our time and get it going. We wrote up a report every Sunday on our blog, having spent the weekend poring over the weekend paper supplements and digesting the latest reviews. Our plan was to offer context in corralling these together, trying to draw lines between the critics’ pieces and map out the lay of the restaurant land. We called it ‘Today’s Chip Paper’, you can still find them here.

We did it pretty much every Sunday for an entire year, but why did we stop? Frankly, sorry to report, it got so boring and banal — it was way too much work (and cost, adding up physical papers and subscriptions) to justify our time, effort or energy, least of all our enthusiasm. The irony of us now being restaurant critics ourselves… but we have always applied that to our own tenure as restaurant critics, keen to constantly keep the reader guessing and interested.

We retired it, but still loved the name. It comes from the ol’ adage “today’s news is tomorrow’s chip paper”, meaning what’s important today is quickly forgotten tomorrow. Mentally but also physically: the fresh press and top stories being resigned to wrap fish and chips fresh from the fryer less than 24 hours later before being discarded as worthless.

We liked the kind of silly image of important words wrapped up in the fatty fabulousness of fried food, and the interplay between both - which is quite reflective of us: wordsmiths with a penchant for fried food.

So, we decided to ditch the timestamp - ‘today’ - and just run with Chip Paper.

Next time we will take you through the three years of Chip Paper so far and how different our plan was for Y1, Y2 and Y3… and whether having a plan at all was conducive to success.