Lyndsay C. Green
Lyndsay C. Green treats restaurant coverage as a way to report on a whole food ecosystem, using reviews, rankings and news stories to build an ongoing portrait of metro Detroit’s dining culture. Her work links the plate to the people and systems behind it, highlighting how restaurants, bakeries, bars and even grocery brands reflect questions of identity, equity, sustainability and everyday pleasure. She combines a critic’s eye for memorable dishes with a reporter’s emphasis on sourcing and context, a style of coverage that has been recognized with major national awards for criticism.
Restaurant criticism as cultural reporting
Green is the dining and restaurant critic at the Detroit Free Press, where she reviews Detroit-area restaurants and shines a light on local food businesses.
Her reviews and dining coverage are rigorously reported, focusing on openings and recommended dishes while also situating each restaurant within the broader story of the city’s communities and food scene. She writes about metro Detroit’s dining landscape as “overflowing with noteworthy establishments,” from exciting new restaurants to tried-and-true classics, cocktail bars, dives and pastry shops, treating each as part of a distinct neighborhood culinary identity. Her approach emphasizes both flavor and feeling; in pieces where she revisits the most memorable dishes from the Detroit Free Press Top 10 New Restaurants list, she explains why certain plates stay with her long after the meal, using sensory detail along with context about the chefs and concepts behind them.
That combination of taste-focused criticism and reported storytelling has drawn national attention. Green was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist for criticism for her coverage of restaurant openings and recommended dishes that double as immersive cultural portraits of the city. She is also a multiple James Beard Award honoree for her restaurant and dining writing, and continues to be nominated for major media awards in food journalism.
In public conversations about her work, she describes her role as “shining a light” on one of the country’s most vibrant and complex restaurant scenes, balancing celebration of standout cooking with scrutiny of how the industry operates.
Top 10 lists and Restaurants of the Year
A core part of Green’s beat is curating and explaining the Detroit Free Press/Chevy Detroit Restaurants of the Year and Top 10 New Restaurants lists, which have become annual touchstones for the region’s dining scene.
She not only publishes ranked lists but writes deeply about what those selections represent, including a decade-long look back at Top 10 New Restaurants that traces how the region’s culinary landscape has evolved over ten years. In that retrospective, she examines how different waves of openings, styles of cooking and neighborhood development are reflected in the changing makeup of the list, treating the rankings as a way to understand broader economic and cultural shifts.
When she shares the most memorable dishes from the Top 10 New Restaurants, she uses those specific plates to illustrate why certain restaurants rise above others in a given year.
Green is transparent about her process, explaining publicly how a restaurant becomes “Restaurant of the Year” and what criteria she uses to evaluate contenders. She has discussed how she prioritizes places that show a strong commitment to diversity, sustainability and other humanitarian or environmental efforts, noting that these values, alongside excellence on the plate, often distinguish the restaurants that stand out.
Her lists therefore function as both consumer guides and editorial statements about the kinds of food businesses that shape a healthy, forward-looking restaurant culture.
Everyday eating, grocery culture and reader engagement
Alongside fine-dining and chef-driven coverage, Green pays close attention to everyday eating and grocery culture, treating supermarket choices and casual meals as meaningful parts of the regional food story. In pieces such as her interactive poll asking readers to vote for their favorite grocery store hot dog brand, she invites her audience to weigh in on mass-market products that many households rely on, framing the conversation around taste, nostalgia and brand loyalty.[INPUT] She uses these formats to engage readers directly, blending lighthearted competition with a deeper interest in how people actually eat at home, not just in restaurants.
Her coverage of neighborhood institutions includes visits to places described as true bodegas and other small food businesses, where she connects product offerings and customer routines to community identity. On social platforms, she regularly asks which Black-owned businesses she should visit next, signaling an ongoing effort to map and highlight underrepresented food entrepreneurs through her reporting. This attention to everyday and community-based eating rounds out her restaurant criticism, ensuring that her beat reflects both special-occasion destinations and the day-to-day food experiences of her readers.
Industry reporting, awards, and food sovereignty
Beyond reviews and lists, Green covers the business side of the restaurant world, including major openings and hospitality developments across metro Detroit. Her article on the new restaurant planned for the Hudson’s Detroit site by the founder of Shake Shack, for example, focuses on what such a high-profile project means for the local dining economy and how limited early details shape expectations. She writes news features on the region’s food industry “gamut,” from artisanal pastry shops to long-running bakeries and swanky cocktail bars, often drawing connections between small operators and larger corporate players.
Green’s professional profiles describe her as a food sovereignty advocate, and her public work reflects that orientation. She participates in conversations about access, equity and representation in food media and restaurant culture, including podcast interviews and live events that examine how critics can use their platforms to support more just food systems. She also serves in a regional leadership role for a prominent international restaurant ranking organization, extending her perspective on Detroit’s food scene to a broader North American context.
Taken together, her criticism, rankings, industry reporting and advocacy position her as a journalist who treats food not only as a source of pleasure, but as a lens on power, place and community.
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.