Christian Alvarez
Christian Alvarez is a food writer who covers chef-driven restaurants and immersive dining experiences for Vancouver Is Awesome. He focuses on stories where concept, craft, and culture intersect, especially new openings, pop-ups, and collaborations built around distinctive culinary visions. His coverage links the details of a meal to the people, places, and creative communities behind it.
Chef-led restaurant openings and concepts
Alvarez’s reporting on new restaurant projects centres on how a clear idea shapes the guest experience, not just what is on the menu. His feature on Entrecôte, a Parisian steak-frites restaurant in Gastown, introduces the concept through its promise of a classic steak-and-fries experience built around a tightly focused menu.
He frames the opening by explaining how the restaurant is structured around a single, timeless dish and what that says about the team’s approach to hospitality. In another piece, he covers a Michelin-recognized team launching a downtown pop-up inspired by Mexico City cantinas, highlighting how the bar and food program are rooted in a specific urban drinking culture.
Across these stories, he treats openings as narratives about ideas and influences, rather than simple announcements of new places to eat.
Profiles of acclaimed chefs and culinary journeys
Alvarez devotes significant attention to chef profiles that show how a cook’s background shapes a restaurant’s identity.
In a feature on Bacchus, he sits down with its chef to chart a path from training under prominent European mentors to earning a Michelin star for a Berlin restaurant and eventually leading the kitchen at the current property. The piece dwells on technique, ingredients, and the chef’s philosophy, showing how personal history translates into dishes on the menu. This emphasis on biography and craft makes his chef coverage read like a portrait of a working kitchen, rather than a simple review or brief.
Immersive dining, collaboration, and cultural storytelling
Outside his reporting, Alvarez creates immersive, culture-driven dining experiences through his Vancouver Chefs and ICON Dinner Series platforms. These projects bring together celebrated chefs for curated collaborations that blend food, film, music, and art, mirroring the multi-sensory focus that runs through his writing. He draws on culinary training, photography, and community-building to frame restaurant stories as part of broader creative and social scenes.
This perspective gives his coverage a producer’s eye for how menus, spaces, and events come together as experiences rather than isolated meals.
Role on the food desk
Alvarez writes for the food and drink coverage at Vancouver Is Awesome as a dedicated food writer. His pieces sit alongside broader dining guides and news, but stand out for their focus on individual chefs, concepts, and atmospheres instead of list-style roundups.
Through these assignments he acts as a bridge between the masthead’s lifestyle focus and the chef community, giving readers an inside view of how new projects and collaborations come to life.
4 more food journalists.
Al Culliton
Al Culliton is a writer and historian whose work focuses on the American cocktail as a living part of food and culture, using obscure, historic drinks to show how bars, spirits and cities change. They write reported features that trace how forgotten recipes move from old bar guides back onto modern menus, reconstructing how cocktails originally tasted and explaining how new builds reshape them. Their beat is revived classics, regional specialties and low-proof aperitifs, covered one drink at a time with close attention to specs, technique, glassware and service. They write about cocktails as cultural artifacts tied to specific communities and geographies, using single recipes to explore place, identity, regional traditions and diaspora histories. Across masthead work and recipe writing, they combine primary-source research with present-day reporting from working bars, in precise, accessible prose grounded in technical detail.
Alaina Chou
Alaina Chou stands out for rigorously testing food and kitchen products and turning those hands-on trials into clear shopping advice. She is a commerce writer at Bon Appétit and Epicurious, where she makes newsletters and shopping guides for home cooks. Her beat is food commerce, with coverage of air fryers, meal kits, protein powders, pepper grinders, electrolyte drinks, and cookbooks. She focuses on what is worth buying, how it performs, how it tastes, and how it fits daily routines and wellness. She also writes sale-driven lists and roundup pieces, and she has worked on Bon Appétit’s Feel Good Food Plan. Her reporting is practical, direct, and grounded in product testing.
Amadea Tanner
Amadea Tanner is a food journalist for Daily Meal whose distinct focus is food history, culinary nostalgia, and the way everyday dishes reveal broader cultural stories. She covers canned baked beans, boomer-era casseroles, cowboy trail food, and sailors’ rations to show how preservation, technology, labor, and survival shaped familiar staples. Her beat includes retro recipes, mid‑20th‑century home cooking, old-school ice cream flavors, and vintage cookbooks, treating them as records of household budgets and aspirations. She also reports on kitchen culture and domestic design, from breakfast alcoves and pie safes to milk doors and wall phones. Tanner investigates global dish origins and contested national claims in pieces on haggis and pavlova. Beyond Daily Meal, she has worked across food, travel, and sustainability, contributing to outlets including Atlas Obscura, Beau Monde Media, Yahoo, and Tasting Table.
Amanda Garrity
Amanda Garrity stands out for turning food, holidays, and family traditions into practical service stories that help readers plan specific celebrations. She is a lifestyle editor at TODAY.com and has more than seven years of experience as a lifestyle writer and editor, including five years on staff at Good Housekeeping, where she covered home, holidays, food, entertainment, and other lifestyle news. Her work also appears in consumer titles including Prevention, Men’s Health, Cosmopolitan, Redbook, and Best Products. Her beat centers on event-based menus, holiday explainers, and classic TV and film guides, with clear, list-driven reporting that gives readers specific dates, recipes, viewing options, and simple background for family planning.