Erica Marcus
Erica Marcus covers restaurants, markets and food culture for Newsday, with a long-running focus on the Long Island food scene. Since 1998, she has been reporting and opining on how people eat across the region, combining critical judgment with service-oriented coverage. Her work stands out for its deep local knowledge and for the way she connects individual restaurants, dishes and trends to the broader story of dining on Long Island. Recent coverage ranges from new dessert spots to neighborhood restaurant guides, historical pieces on signature local dishes and practical roundups tailored to specific occasions.
Long Island restaurants and food scene
Marcus’s core beat is the Long Island restaurant landscape, and she writes across formats from full reviews to short, newsy write-ups. She covers a broad spectrum of venues, profiling inexpensive, casual spots such as China Station alongside higher-end destinations like Polo Steakhouse and chef-driven Middle Eastern concepts such as Petra Grill. Her pieces highlight what distinguishes each place - value, authenticity, ambiance or culinary ambition - so that readers can quickly understand why a restaurant matters within the local scene.
She also produces neighborhood and destination-driven guides that map where to eat in specific areas. Critics’ picks for places like Greenport, as well as roundups of restaurants near anchors such as the UBS Arena, show her habit of organizing coverage around how people actually move through and experience Long Island. Weekend suggestion lists that feature spots like Turkuaz Grill and other restaurants across the island further reinforce that she treats dining as part of a wider pattern of leisure and everyday life.
Marcus tracks the business side of restaurants, documenting both resilience and vulnerability in the industry. She has reported on how multi-restaurant groups adapted their operations during COVID-era shifts, and she covers closures such as the Stone Crab seafood restaurant, explaining how a concept evolved and why it ultimately shut its doors. These stories add an economic and operational layer to her food coverage, connecting the experience at the table to the pressures behind the scenes.
Cuisine guides and food traditions
A recurring strand in Marcus’s work is cuisine-specific coverage that helps readers navigate Long Island’s diverse food offerings. She curates lists of new Italian restaurants to try, and she profiles Italian specialty stores and pork shops, showing how imported products and long-standing merchants shape local eating habits.
Her guide to Latin American cuisine on the island similarly surveys multiple restaurants and styles, positioning them within the broader culinary mix rather than treating them as isolated novelties.
Marcus also writes about food traditions and origin stories, using local dishes as entry points into culinary history. Her work on grandma pizza traces how specific Long Island restaurants developed and popularized the style, and she notes how an earlier report of hers became a key reference for subsequent accounts of the dish. Pieces like this distinguish her from a generic food reporter, showing a sustained interest in documentation and in how regional specialties take shape over time.
Beyond Italian and Latin American food, she covers Japanese and Middle Eastern offerings through openings such as Kyoto Mart & Deli and detailed reviews of restaurants like Petra Grill. These articles focus on how owners express cultural identity through menus and design, and on how those restaurants fit into the existing local dining fabric. The result is coverage that treats “ethnic” cuisines as integral parts of the mainstream restaurant scene rather than as side notes.
Service features for diners
Many of Marcus’s stories function as direct service pieces, organized around specific needs or occasions rather than around a single restaurant. She has produced critics’ picks that answer where to eat in a given town and thematic lists such as Long Island restaurants with fireplaces, which help readers find the right setting for a certain mood or season. These guides blend her evaluative perspective with straightforward utility, making them easy to act on.
She also focuses on how diners can access food beyond traditional sit-down meals.
Coverage of butchers, fish markets and other purveyors that pivoted to delivery shows her interest in the supply side of eating, and in how changes in logistics and service affect what ends up on people’s tables. By bringing these retail and distribution stories into her beat, she gives a fuller picture of the food ecosystem than a restaurant-only lens would provide.
Marcus regularly surfaces new and notable places in short, timely formats, whether spotlighting dessert shops opening for the summer or compiling collections of restaurants to try over a weekend. She tends to frame these pieces around discovery and immediacy, identifying what is new, what is closing and what is worth prioritizing now.
Together with her longer reviews and historical essays, these roundups make her coverage both an archive of the Long Island food scene and a current roadmap for where to eat next.
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.