Alana Al-Hatlani

Alana Al-Hatlani is a food writer and editor on the food team at Southern Living, overseeing and contributing to print food stories that span recipes and reported features. Her work stands out for treating recipes, restaurant roundups, and food features as ways to explore culture, community, and the business of eating, rather than just lists of dishes. She brings a pastry-focused and restaurant-tested perspective to her editing, informed by time spent in restaurant and bakery kitchens. Across assignments, she balances hands-on service pieces - tips, techniques, and ingredient explainers - with narrative reporting on how food connects people and places.

The South’s Most Treasured Desserts

On the print side, Al-Hatlani helps plan and write monthly food packages, including features such as “The South’s Most Treasured Desserts” that organize recipes into clear, themed collections. Her story “8 Summer Recipes Our Editors Make Every Year” gathers seasonal recipes that function as recurring rituals for the magazine’s editors.

In many recipe pages, she writes intros and tips for dishes developed by test kitchen colleagues, explaining why a Green Goddess butter works, how a pimiento cheese butter can be used, or what makes super-fluffy pancakes turn out right. These pieces focus on accessible technique, serving ideas, and flavor cues that help home cooks understand how and when to use each recipe, from sweet potato pie–inspired butter to brioche pull-apart skillet rolls and hearty pot pies. Her voice in these stories is direct and pragmatic, guiding readers through flavor profiles, textures, and small adjustments that make recipes feel repeatable and trustworthy.

Food As Culture And Community

Beyond recipe work, Al-Hatlani pursues reported food and travel stories that look at food as culture and livelihood. Her features include reporting on Louisiana shrimpers fighting to preserve a historic Gulf industry, a nearly 90-year-old Houston cafeteria that functions as a surrogate home during the holidays, and wok-fried collard greens that have become a fixture of the Mississippi Delta.

Her reporting has been recognized with the IACP Toni Tipton-Martin Award, which she uses to support further food stories across the South from West Texas to Miami. She also traces the origins of regional specialties, such as how the jojo - a seasoned, fried potato wedge - became a Pacific Northwest staple. These stories pair on-the-ground reporting with attention to the people behind the food, foregrounding workers, owners, and communities rather than trends alone.

The result is coverage that reads as human-centered reporting about industry, place, and memory, anchored in specific dishes and institutions.

Seattle Restaurants And Dining Guides

Al-Hatlani writes extensively about restaurants, with a particular depth of coverage on Seattle’s dining scene and other notable destinations for OpenTable’s editorial platform. Her guides catalog the city’s greatest restaurants, top places to grab a drink, and standout patios and outdoor dining spots, mapping the local landscape with clear, occasion-based recommendations. She extends that approach to broader roundups, such as the best hotel restaurants in the U.S. and Canada and lists of “eatertainment” venues where bowling alleys, golf simulators, and other activities sit alongside serious food. Across these pieces, she focuses on specific venues, chefs, and use cases - where to go for a date, a group outing, or a special meal - giving readers concrete options while situating them within larger dining trends.

Her restaurant coverage reflects the same mix of service and storytelling seen in her magazine work: clear criteria, detailed descriptions, and an eye for how a place fits into its city’s broader food culture.

Ingredient Deep Dives And Kitchen Basics

Al-Hatlani frequently takes on service pieces that answer practical questions about ingredients and kitchen staples. Her horseradish story for Southern Living explains the root’s mythology, a founder’s discovery of cream-style horseradish, and the differences between prepared and fresh versions, anchoring brand history in guidance on how to use the ingredient in everyday cooking. Her butter explainer for Yahoo walks through how to store butter, when to refrigerate or freeze it, and how long it maintains quality, ending with straightforward checks on smell, appearance, and taste before deciding whether to toss it. Taken together with her recipe intros and tips, these service articles reinforce her role as a practical explainer who translates technical details - storage times, fat content, flavor strength - into simple steps for home cooks and diners. This combination of ingredient deep dives, kitchen basics, restaurant mapping, and cultural reporting defines her beat: food as something to understand, cook, and experience, with clarity at every level.