Kevin Vaughn says life is too short to work with shitty editors
He moved to Buenos Aires at age 23 and became a magazine publisher and tour company owner.
Happy Tuesday, Substack readers! I hope your week is off to a great start full of productive writing activities. I’m so glad you’re here!
This week I wanted to share the work and profile of another writer whose work I really admire with you! He has had an interesting and varied career at the intersection of food and literature. I’ll let him tell you all about it, but I hope you’ll also take a moment to read some of his work and subscribe to his digital publication, MATAMBRE.
I discovered Kevin Vaughn’s writing a few months ago when a writer friend set me his article about Italian food in Argentina, called “Who Does Pasta Belong To?” published in Eater’s Travel section. Not only is the story beautifully crafted, it’s so nuanced and intelligent—I was instantly stanning.
A quick Google search pulled up his website, where I was able to dive deeper into his writing about his passion—Argentinean food—for publications like Departures, Conde Nast Traveler, Punch, and Serious Eats. Without further ado, I hope you enjoy learning about a writer whose work I love to read (I think he just nails it on so many levels) and who inspires and challenges me to be a better writer myself.
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Name: Kevin Vaughn
Birthplace/hometown: I was born and raised in Los Banos, California. It’s a small, rural town in the San Joaquin Valley.
Education: I went to UC: Santa Barbara. I studied Global Studies and Spanish. It’s an interdisciplinary major that combines poli sci and economics with anthropology and language. It definitely informs my entire approach to writing.
Career history: I studied abroad in Buenos Aires, graduated and worked for a year saving money, and moved back to Argentina. At 23, I started as a summer intern at a bilingual culture blog in Buenos Aires. I was hired and steadily moved up until I was managing editor. It wasn’t enough money (when is media ever?) and Argentines are natural hustlers, so I spent most of my early twenties hopping around odd jobs. I was an events planner, film critic, translator, social media manager, manny, band manager, and English teacher. I think that's all of them. Happenstance led me to food and I fully transitioned into that space at around 27. I was a private cook and hosted a successful supper club turned pop up called MASA. Currently, I have a food tourism business called Devour Buenos Aires and write about food.
Preferred social handles: iamkevinvaughn on instagram. I deleted everything else in a fury at the end of 2023 and never looked back.
Pronouns: he/him
Start by telling us the basics—where do you live and what is your focus?
I live in Buenos Aires, Argentina. I moved here in 2010. I thought I’d stick around for a year or two and go home to take the LSAT. I wanted to be a human rights lawyer!
I’m a food writer with a focus on Argentine culture and history. I also do recipe development. My focus draws a lot from my schooling, especially anthropology. I’m not really interested in restaurants or defining taste. I think food and travel writing is far too individualistic and interested in aspirational living. Food is a mirror to everything and I’m most interested in how overlapping systems inform what, how, and why people eat what they eat. I’m also fascinated by how societies represent themselves through narrative. The string that ties everything together is an interest in expanding Argentina’s narrative.
How did you start your career as a freelance food and travel writer?
It’s a long origin story! None of this is what I imagined. I was always very creative but never envisioned it as a career option.
When I moved back to Buenos Aires in 2010, I got a job with a bilingual culture magazine. It had an amazing daily cultural calendar and I was in charge of building that out every week. The city was a lot more rough around the edges then. Everything was very DIY. There’s still some of that because Argentina is a country in constant crisis but social media has made culture feel more duplicitous and impersonal. The cultural ecosystem was very much that all you needed was an idea and the rest would align somehow. I was 23, very idealistic, and that scene was so inspiring to be around.
One night, I went to cover a puerta cerrada, which were supper clubs hosted in private homes that became really popular in the late aughts. The new food scene in the early 2010s was really exclusive and expensive and not very good! It was a really snobby scene that contrasted a lot with the arts and party scene, so I didn’t pay it a lot of attention. I arrived at this supper club and the amuse bouche was a joint. The plates were mismatched, they served soups in coffee mugs, and most of the seating was on the floor. It was potluck-style vegan food and everyone paid whatever they wanted. People went wild over it! It was this lightbulb moment for me that there was a space for something different in the food scene. I lived alone and so my apartment was the place all my friends hung out at. I was always cooking and decided to start my own supper club. It was called MASA and I served Mexican dishes inspired by my childhood in California. My apartment was too small so I partnered up with two friends, Romi and Evy, and rotated the dinner once a week between their houses. On that first night, a woman named Vina came alone. She had a personal blog she wanted to turn into a full-blown website about Buenos Aires. We hit it off immediately and she asked if I’d be interested in writing about food for her. I did reviews and recipe development.
Over time, food felt more and more like the right space to explore my interests. I started taking cooking really seriously and transitioned the supper club into a pop up. The project lasted for 7 or 8 years. I was starting to plan a restaurant in late 2019. COVID squashed that and the project sort of fizzled out. Clients constantly write to me to bring it back and I’m always kicking around the idea of doing one-off events. During the pandemic, I shifted the bulk of my work to writing and eventually tourism. Everything is an excuse to eat. Diversifying the work I do has proven very smart although it wasn’t intentional at all.
What are some of the projects you've been most proud of so far and publications you've been most excited to work with?
I love all the pieces I’ve written for Vittles. I really admire Jonathan Nunn’s vision and how unbending he is about what he wants to create. He’s an incredible editor and his edits are always spot-on and very honest. He’s made me a much better writer and editor. And he has done an incredible job building a team of very thoughtful, talented people.
Tell me about Matambre.
Matambre began in June 2020. Like everyone else, I had a lot of time on my hands. I wanted a space where I could write whatever I wanted. There’s not a lot of opportunities to write really rich stories about foreign destinations. So much travel writing gets whittled down to “eat this” and “stay here.” So it was also a moment of frustration to create the thing I wanted to read with pieces that go deeper into the culture and history of food.
What have been your favorite travel destinations?
I love northern Argentina, especially on the Andes side in regions like Salta, Tucuman, Jujuy, and Catamarca. There’s a lot of very interesting ancestral dishes hidden away in small towns. Every time I travel to the Northwest, I dream about buying a little patch of land in the mountains, becoming a hermit, and adopting a bunch of mountain dogs. On the total opposite end of the spectrum, I traveled to Japan in January and was absolutely blown away. The order, the nature, the comforts. The food!
What projects are you working on coming up that you're excited to share?
I’ve been working on a new website for MATAMBRE for the last six months and we’re getting close to finishing the final details. I can’t say very much but it’s been a long time coming.
What is one of the most challenging things you've overcome in your freelance career?
A very hard lesson to learn is that the media industry doesn’t take care of its own and freelancers are at the bottom of the pyramid, especially in legacy media. I would love to make a good living exclusively writing about food, but that’s just not my reality right now. Partly from having a very specific niche and partly because the commissions haven’t moved an inch since I’ve started working. As I get older, working for thirty cents a word or spending so much time pitching isn’t as easy to justify. It took me a long time and a lot of angst and self-loathing before I realized it wasn’t me that was failing. The media industry fails its creators. It’s really important to take care of yourself, develop flexibility and resilience, and build your own definitions of success.
What advice would you give to writers who are just breaking into freelancing?
There’s nothing wrong with content writing as long as your name’s not on it. Or having a side hustle you enjoy. We all have to eat. There’s this image on social media that everyone’s living their best life writing. I’m all for faking it until you make it but remember, social media isn’t real and you shouldn’t compare yourself to how someone else presents themselves on their feed. A regular paycheck from one big contract takes a lot of stress out of your daily grind and allows you to be selective about the work that actually has your name on it.
What are three tips from Kevin Vaughn?
* Life is too short to put up with shitty editors. Do consistent work and build relationships with good people and opportunities will come.
* Don’t underestimate people. You never know what story you might hear.
* Never eat in a restaurant in the main plaza.