Nicole Pasia
Nicole Pasia is a features engagement journalist at The Seattle Times whose food coverage is built around how people gather, connect and create community through what they eat and do together. She focuses on stories that link everyday dining, entertainment and local experiences, using service-driven reporting to show how readers can take part in those scenes. Her work sits at the intersection of food, culture and audience engagement, with a steady emphasis on practical guidance and a strong sense of place.
Food and Drink Guides for Everyday Eating
Pasia regularly produces food and drink roundups that help readers navigate a changing landscape of restaurants, coffee shops and casual dining spots. Her pieces highlight dozens of newly opened places to eat and drink, covering a wide range of neighborhoods and price points in a single dispatch. In coverage of local closures, she balances news about beloved spots that have shut their doors with information on new openings, keeping readers current on where they can go next.
She writes about fast, affordable lunch options, spotlighting specific venues for dishes like gyros and tonkatsu to show where a quick meal can still feel satisfying. Her food beat also includes playful, newsy items such as the story of a local hot dog loaded with cream cheese that was singled out nationally as the country’s best, using these moments to underline how regional staples fit into larger culinary conversations.
Her earlier work at Seattle Met included detailed profiles of chefs and concepts, from a barbecue pitmaster returning with an Appalachian tasting menu to the team behind a latke sandwich shop moving from food truck to permanent restaurant, underscoring her long-standing attention to how menus, technique and ambition translate into a dining experience.
Food Stories That Tie Cuisine to Community
Pasia’s food reporting often centers on how restaurants and dishes reflect the communities around them, not just what appears on the plate. At Seattle Met she wrote about Off the Rez Cafe, describing how an Indigenous food truck’s move into a museum space brought Native cuisine and the communities that shape the region’s history into sharper focus. Her coverage of a latke-focused restaurant spin-off and other chef-driven projects connects specific dishes to broader questions of identity, tradition and innovation in local food culture.
At The Seattle Times, she has offered recommendations for celebrating Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, including the reopening of the Seattle Asian Art Museum, framing food and cultural venues together as ways to honor and participate in the month’s themes. She has also published a personal travel story about visiting the Philippines that weaves meals, family visits and well-known landscapes into a narrative, showing how food and memory mutually reinforce each other in her storytelling.
The hot dog feature, which centers on a familiar local snack elevated by a national ranking, fits this approach by using a single item to explore pride, nostalgia and the surprisingly strong bonds that form around everyday foods.
Guides to Local Experiences and Urban Nature
Alongside restaurant coverage, Pasia writes service pieces that map out what to do around the region on a given weekend, often organizing them by food, drink and distinctive local events. One such guide invites readers to explore “wacky” pizza collaborations, including limited-edition pies topped with Taco Time hot sauce and Ivar’s clam chowder, pairing those with recommendations for a handmade sculpture race and other unusual happenings. Her roundups routinely combine dining suggestions with activities like hiking in nearby foothills, positioning meals as part of a fuller experience of place.
In a feature on “blue spaces,” she explains the science behind the city’s many water environments, using expert voices to connect lakes, shorelines and other aquatic settings to health, well-being and the reasons people are drawn to them. Taken together, these guides treat food, landscape and leisure as a single continuum, emphasizing how small decisions - where to eat, where to walk, which event to attend - add up to a shared local life.
Pop Culture, Sports and Audience Engagement
Pasia’s engagement role extends beyond food into pop culture and sports, where she writes with the perspective of a participant as well as a reporter. In a commentary on the animated film “KPop Demon Hunters,” she joins another features reporter to discuss the movie as longtime K‑pop fans, unpacking what makes the film resonate and how it reflects the dynamics of modern fandom. Her contributions to a story on the most “ground‑shaking” moments in recent Seahawks playoff history draw on seismic data from major games and connect it to fan behavior, showing how collective excitement becomes literally measurable.
This mix of pop culture analysis and sports-adjacent storytelling complements her food coverage by tracing how taste, fandom and shared experiences shape community from multiple angles. Before taking on her current engagement-focused role, she worked on the photo desk and contributed reporting for outlets such as Seattle Met and the International Examiner, experience that informs her attention to visual detail, audience needs and the practical utility of her features.
Across beats, she maintains a clear, service-oriented style that favors concise explanations, specific examples and stories that help readers decide how to spend their time.
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.