Brianna Caleri
Brianna Caleri covers Austin dining as part of a wider culture beat, connecting restaurant news and chef stories to the city’s awards, events, and creative scene. She writes with a focus on how openings, closings, and culinary talent shape everyday eating, highlighting both the business realities of restaurants and their place in local life.
City editor with a food-forward culture brief
Caleri is the city editor for CultureMap Austin and also edits coverage for CultureMap San Antonio. In that role she oversees and contributes to culture reporting that frequently centers on restaurants, chefs, and food events.
Her work reflects a broad culture lens, but food news - from new concepts to signature events - is a recurring anchor.
Restaurant openings, closings, and neighborhood food news
Caleri regularly covers movement in the local restaurant landscape, with roundups that gather multiple changes into a single, readable brief. One recent piece highlights “9 openings and closings to know about this April in Austin food news,” distilling new arrivals and shuttered spots into a concise update. She also writes focused news stories on individual restaurants, such as the closing of El Naranjo after more than 15 years, explaining the timing and significance of the decision for diners who followed the restaurant’s evolution.
Across these formats, she treats openings and closings as both business updates and cultural milestones, emphasizing what each change means for regular guests and the broader dining scene.
Chef-driven dining and awards coverage
Caleri’s food coverage often foregrounds chefs and culinary leadership rather than just the venues themselves.
In reporting on El Naranjo’s closure, she details the contributions of James Beard Award–winning chef Iliana de la Vega and the restaurant’s longstanding emphasis on authenticity in Mexican cuisine. She co-wrote a piece revealing “Austin's best restaurants and chefs” tied to the 2026 Tastemaker Awards, cataloging honorees across categories and spotlighting the teams behind them. Another feature, “These 8 rising star chefs are the future of Austin's food scene,” focuses on up-and-coming talent, positioning their work as indicative of where local food is heading.
Taken together, these stories show a consistent interest in the personalities, accolades, and trajectories that define chef-driven dining.
Food events, collaborations, and experiential culture
Beyond static restaurant coverage, Caleri reports on food events and collaborations that shape how locals experience dining. A recent headline notes Texas Monthly’s “Community Meat-up,” announcing tickets for a Lockhart picnic featuring more than 30 top barbecue joints. In this kind of story she tracks partnerships between media brands and restaurants, large-scale tastings, and other gatherings that turn food into a shared cultural experience.
Her editing and writing in this area show an emphasis on how special events, tastings, and awards nights connect diners with chefs and restaurants in real time.
Format and tone
Caleri works across formats including news briefs on specific restaurants, multi-item roundups, and feature-style profiles of chefs and award nominees. She writes in straightforward, accessible language that keeps the focus on what is new or changing in the food scene, while adding enough background to explain why a restaurant, chef, or event matters.
Her food stories consistently place restaurant news within a larger culture narrative, making them useful for understanding both the immediate update and the longer-term direction of Austin dining.
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.