Bettina Makalintal
Food writing at the intersection of restaurant trends, home cooking, and online culture is Bettina Makalintal’s focus. She is a senior reporter at Eater, where she covers the dishes, chefs, and social media moments shaping how people eat and talk about food today. Her work across magazines, drinks publications, and food specialty outlets extends that lens to awards, bar culture, and global cuisines.
Restaurant trends and viral food culture
Makalintal’s core beat at Eater is restaurant trends and the food that saturates social feeds, especially the viral dishes that dominate TikTok. Her reporting maps how internet-born phenomena translate into real-world menus and dining experiences, treating online buzz as part of the restaurant landscape rather than a separate curiosity.
She writes in a reported, explanatory style that connects specific dishes and collaborations with the bigger story of how pop culture and social platforms reshape expectations of what restaurants should serve.
Outside Eater, she carries this focus on trend-driven food into other outlets, contributing stories that link drinks, branded beverages, and nostalgia to what bars and restaurants are pouring now. A piece on Baja Blast cocktail riffs, for example, looks at how a mass-market soda flavor migrates into craft cocktails and becomes a mini-trend in bars and restaurants, grounding the story in specific venues and drink builds. This kind of work distinguishes her from a generic restaurant reporter by emphasizing the cultural pathways that bring a dish or drink from fast food, childhood memories, or social media into contemporary hospitality.
Her broader food-and-culture coverage includes essays and reported features that follow collaborations and revivals - such as a pizza chain tie-in with a doll brand or the return of fruitcake - as indicators of how audiences think about comfort, kitsch, and seasonal traditions. These stories show a consistent interest in how food functions as entertainment and identity marker, not only as something cooked and served.
Food media, awards, and industry recognition
Makalintal also covers the institutional side of food culture, including major awards and the media that documents the industry. Her article on the 2026 James Beard Media Awards walks through winners across cookbooks, food and beverage books, radio, podcasts, documentaries, social media, and journalism, organizing a sprawling list into clear categories and concise summaries.
The piece treats awards as a way to understand which narratives and formats are being celebrated in contemporary food storytelling, drawing attention to both established media and newer digital forms.
Within Eater’s larger awards coverage, her media awards story sits alongside reporting on restaurant and chef winners, reinforcing her role as someone who tracks both what happens in kitchens and how those stories are told. This emphasis on the ecosystem of food media - books, broadcasts, digital platforms - adds a layer to her beat that goes beyond reviewing restaurants or profiling individual chefs. It positions her as a reporter who can situate a single award or project within the wider conversation about representation, genre, and the evolving standards of excellence in food journalism and storytelling.
Home cooking, recipes, and cheese
Alongside her restaurant and culture coverage, Makalintal has a substantial body of work rooted in home cooking and recipe development, particularly around cheese. Her time at a cheese-focused magazine produced collaborative recipes such as chicory salad with brown butter vinaigrette and smoked blue cheese, preserved lemon ice cream with olive oil and sea salt, gougères with Ossau-Iraty and Piment d’Espelette, and rye crispbreads with labneh and hot-smoked salmon. These pieces combine detailed, stepwise instructions with explanations of flavor pairing and texture, showing a strong grasp of both culinary technique and ingredient-specific storytelling.
Beyond recipes, she has written service pieces oriented toward enthusiasts, including guidance on celebrating Raw Milk Cheese Appreciation Day and roundups of recommended cheese gear. These articles treat readers as curious cooks and hosts, offering practical tools while maintaining a clear point of view about what makes certain cheeses, tools, or rituals worth attention.
Her own site describes her current work as covering trends in home cooking as well as restaurants and online food culture, reflecting that this recipe and gear experience continues to inform her reported pieces.
Her home cooking orientation is also visible in public conversations and audio appearances, where she discusses cooking as a daily practice and a source of creative experimentation rather than rigid recipe-following. That “no recipes, just vibes” ethos, highlighted in a profile about her cooking, explains why even her reported trend stories often return to what people actually cook at home and how they adapt professional or viral food to their own kitchens.
Drinks, nightlife, and broader culture
Makalintal’s work on drinks and nightlife extends her food-and-culture beat into bar spaces and social settings. At PUNCH, she has written about Baja Blast-inspired cocktails trending at bars and restaurants, examining how a specific flavor and brand migrate into the world of mixology and what that reveals about playfulness and nostalgia in contemporary drinking culture. In the same outlet, a story about taking a “How to Dance at the Club” class situates nightlife as a learned, participatory culture, linking movement, music, and the social rituals that often surround drinking.
Her professional bio notes that her work has appeared across outlets including major magazines, newspapers, and public radio food verticals, underscoring that she is trusted to cover food and culture for both specialist and general audiences. She is a frequent guest on podcasts from food-focused shows like TASTE to programs under broader media brands such as Slate, where she talks about topics including social media’s impact on global foods and the future of food culture.
This cross-platform presence reinforces the sense that her beat is not only restaurants or recipes, but the full media and cultural environment in which food is discussed, shared, and performed.
Across these strands - restaurant trends, food media and awards, home cooking and cheese, and drinks and nightlife - Makalintal’s distinguishing trait is her ability to treat food as a cultural system, connecting specific dishes, drinks, and stories to the broader forces of internet culture, nostalgia, and identity. Her coverage offers both concrete reporting on who is doing what and why, and a clear interest in how those choices resonate far beyond the plate or glass.
4 more food journalists.
Aaron Guerrero
Aaron Guerrero is head of the digital department at Miami’s Community Newspapers, where he pairs restaurant coverage with community-facing content. He focuses on how Miami-area restaurants evolve, celebrate, and experiment through new concepts, menus, and neighborhood-focused dining experiences. He reports on restaurant openings, such as an Italian food hall at Plaza Coral Gables, new executive lunch menus, and wood-fired Latin steakhouse brunches, explaining what sets each venue apart. He also covers awards, like a Wine Spectator honor for an Italian chophouse, and events that turn dining rooms into social hubs. His bylines extend to features on sports-themed gatherings, civic renamings, local visits to restaurant programs, sponsored community pieces, and official notices. His work is straightforward and descriptive, helping readers and local businesses connect around specific openings, promotions, and dining experiences.
Aarron Fleming
Aarron Fleming reports on how courts, jails and public safety systems work over time. He is a reporter at The Daily Memphian covering public safety, the local court system, suburban news and business developments in North Mississippi. His work follows trials, sentencing, appeals, plea deals and judicial decisions, including major cases tied to Tyre Nichols and rapper Young Dolph. He also covers jail conditions, inmate deaths, crime data, prosecution units, trafficking, shootings and public-order incidents. His suburban reporting examines cannabis businesses, restaurant openings and how commercial growth affects communities such as Olive Branch. Fleming previously covered education in the same newsroom. He uses clear, unadorned prose to explain legal steps, deadlines, institutional problems and the political, commercial and community effects of public-safety decisions.
Alana Al-Hatlani
Alana Al-Hatlani is a food writer and editor who treats recipes, restaurants, and food features as ways to explore culture, community, and the business of eating. She works on the food team at Southern Living, overseeing and contributing to print recipes and reported features. Her pastry-focused, restaurant-tested perspective comes from time in restaurant and bakery kitchens. She helps plan and write monthly food packages, including “The South’s Most Treasured Desserts,” and wrote “8 Summer Recipes Our Editors Make Every Year.” She also writes recipe tips, ingredient explainers, restaurant guides, and reported stories about workers, owners, and communities. Her subjects include regional specialties, dining scenes, kitchen basics, and food industries. Her work has appeared with OpenTable and Yahoo. She reports on the ground, explains techniques clearly, and connects specific dishes and places to larger stories about food and livelihood.
Alana Edgin
Alana Edgin is a business reporter whose strongest focus is food, restaurants and consumer-facing businesses. She works at the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal and has also had work syndicated across AOL and Yahoo News. She covers new openings, closings, expansions and franchise growth, along with retail, health, services, corporate news, data incidents, business support programs and sponsorships. Her reporting includes detailed roundups of new restaurants and businesses, coverage of El Pollo Loco’s opening, and stories on burger trucks, dessert shops, Vietnamese sandwich restaurants and gourmet markets. She also contributes to food and drink reviews, including fall coffee and jerky comparisons. Edgin reports with practical “what, when, where” details, structured comparisons and clear explanations of how offers, partnerships and business changes affect consumers and the local economy.