Kristy Graver
Kristy Graver brings a storytelling lens to food coverage, using restaurant profiles, themed columns, and citywide guides to connect local eating spots with the people, memories, and experiences around them. She works as a food editor and feature writer at Pittsburgh Magazine, focusing on restaurants, bars, bakeries, and food‑adjacent community spaces.
Eat + Drink restaurant coverage
Graver’s core work sits in the magazine’s Eat + Drink coverage, where she writes detailed pieces on individual restaurants and emerging food concepts. Her feature on Mijo Cantina explores its mix of New Mexican and traditional Mexican flavors, highlighting how the menu blends regional influences in a local setting. She visits places like the Derby, a space that combines food with live entertainment, underscoring how atmosphere and experience shape dining as much as the menu itself. In burger‑focused coverage, she moves from smash burgers and vegan options to inventive takes like burger pizza and donut-inspired offerings, emphasizing variety and creativity over strict fine‑dining hierarchy. She also profiles a sourdough microbakery that “specializes in literature and loaves,” following how its products are sold online and through a small shop, and using the business to show how craft baking can intersect with book culture and niche retail. Across these restaurant and bakery pieces, she consistently centers the concept and character of the venue, giving readers a sense of how each place fits into the wider food fabric of the city.
Dig in With Graver
Graver writes a recurring column, Dig in With Graver, where food is a vehicle for nostalgia, pop culture, and personal connection. In “Don’t Worry, Be Smiley,” she revisits Smiley cookies through a mix of humor and sentiment, describing the experience as a fun, informative read that can leave readers “smile through fat, nostalgic tears,” and framing a familiar snack as a portal to memory. In “A Foodie Tribute to Rob Reiner,” she connects the late director’s movies with “plenty of food for thought,” blending film references with culinary themes to show how iconic scenes and lines can map onto eating and cooking. The column’s tone is conversational and reflective, but the pieces remain grounded in specific foods, brands, and cultural touchpoints, making the writing feel both personal and anchored in recognizable details. This strand of her work distinguishes her from more purely review‑driven food writers; she uses the column to explore why certain foods matter to people, not just how they taste.
Best of the ’Burgh and curated picks
Graver plays a visible role in the magazine’s awards and list coverage, particularly around the Best of the ’Burgh franchise. In “Kristy’s Picks,” she is credited as Associate Editor and highlights her favorite winners in the Food & Restaurants category, curating standouts rather than simply tallying rankings. Her staff picks include places such as Kaufman Tavern’s Peacock Room, which she flags in a broader round‑up of notable venues, signaling attention to both food and design in her selections. In Top Stories round‑ups, she is described as Associate Editor while featuring seasonal events and winners, further reinforcing her role as a curator of what’s noteworthy in the local food and dining scene. This list‑driven work shows a different facet of her coverage: instead of deep single‑venue profiles, she pulls out patterns across restaurants and bars, surfacing the spots that define the moment for the magazine’s audience.
The 412 and community stories
Beyond food‑section pieces, Graver contributes heavily to The 412 and other lifestyle and community coverage, often where hospitality, creativity, and place overlap. She writes service‑style guides such as “Five Budget‑Friendly Ways To Stay Cool And Beat The Heat,” combining practical tips with an eye for accessible local experiences. In The 412, she covers openings like Pennsylvania’s first bunny café, presenting it as a distinctive concept within the region’s café landscape and highlighting its appeal as a novel gathering space. She has written about Ruckus Cafe, Kennywood Cocoa, and Turner's Iced Tea in a piece that encourages readers to “enjoy a new Downtown spot while you enter sweet online contests,” weaving together beverage culture, nostalgia brands, and engagement mechanics. Her community features extend to profiles of creative and heritage projects: she tells the story of artist Nikk Alcaraz, whose life is described as “like a Hallmark Christmas movie” and who brings a Disney‑inflected sensibility to Brownsville’s Christmas windows; she covers the Italian Garden Project, focusing on how it preserves stories through oral histories, photography, and living gardens. She also writes Hot Property pieces about homes that have “breathed new life” into 1940s‑era architecture and reports on developments like Arts Landing tied to the 2026 NFL Draft and park openings, showing comfort with design, event, and urban‑space narratives. Additional features spotlight book‑centered businesses such as The Raven’s Quill, with owners thanking her for “sharing our story so beautifully” and emphasizing books “that linger long after the final page,” along with farm stories in magazine issues that take readers onto working properties. Outside the page, she is part of the PittsburgHER Podcast, a bi‑weekly show produced by Pittsburgh Magazine and YaJagoff Media, where she appears alongside other hosts, extending her perspective into audio storytelling. Together, these pieces show a consistent thread: Graver gravitates toward places and projects where food, drink, books, art, and space meet, and she uses reported features, guides, and profiles to make those intersections feel vivid and accessible.
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.