Nicolle Monico
Nicolle Monico connects food, dating, travel, and wellness through first-person stories and practical guides that show how people eat, meet, and unwind in and around the city. She is an award-winning writer and the director of creative projects and digital editor at San Diego Magazine, with more than 16 years of experience. Alongside her editorial leadership, she maintains an active writing portfolio that spans restaurant coverage, dating columns, and experiential features.
Food, drink, and where to go now
Food and drink coverage is a central part of Monico’s work, often framed as where to go and what to try right now.
She has written about a Japanese curry concept that moved from the stadium to a neighborhood restaurant, tracking how a popular ballpark dish becomes a full-service destination in the city’s dining landscape. In multi-writer packages such as “Best Of San Diego: Food & Drink,” she contributes to roundups that highlight standout restaurants, bars, and dishes, positioning them within broader “best-of” coverage.
She also shares credit on service pieces like “Celebrate Spring With These 5 Outdoor Happy Hours,” which spotlight outdoor bars and patios, menu highlights, and drink specials, giving readers time-specific, place-specific recommendations. Her food stories tend to be embedded in lifestyle angles - happy hours, neighborhood openings, and destination meals - rather than standalone reviews, making them useful for connecting culinary trends to how people actually spend their time.
Dating, love, and life in the city
Monico is a prominent voice on dating and relationships, leading a recurring series that looks closely at the local dating scene. Her column “Unhinged, A Dating Series” follows her experiences and questions around modern dating, with installments that include Q&A features and essays on topics such as dating after an unhealthy relationship and what simple gestures can do to secure a second date. A piece like “10 San Diego Pools to Meet Your Soulmate” ties dating advice directly to place, turning ordinary amenities into social settings where readers might meet partners.
She has edited or curated collections such as “12 Reader-Submitted Love Letters to San Diego,” where community contributions anchor a broader narrative about affection for the city itself. An editor’s note under the “Love on the Brain” theme has her looking back at some of the magazine’s more offbeat dating stories, reinforcing her role as both columnist and editor in this space. Social coverage around her work notes that she launched her dating column around Valentine’s Day to seek advice from relationship experts and dissect contemporary dating, underscoring a blend of personal perspective and expert input.
Together, these pieces distinguish her as someone who uses local spots - pools, bars, neighborhoods - as a framework for exploring intimacy, connection, and the realities of dating.
Travel, wellness, and personal essays
Beyond food and dating, Monico writes travel and wellness features that are openly personal. In “Chasing Spiritual Enlightenment in Sedona,” she approaches travel as a search for meaning, tying the geography and local experiences to questions of self and spirituality. “Burnout and Birria in Guadalajara” similarly pairs a destination with a specific dish, using a trip to explore exhaustion, recovery, and the comfort found in food.
On the health side, she has reported on insomnia through “Can BrainEcho Technology Help Treat Insomnia?,” describing how she tried sound-based technology after dealing with sleep problems for two decades. A feature in the magazine’s sports section follows her enlistment of pro runner Chari Hawkins to help her find her stride again, combining expert guidance with a candid account of rebuilding a fitness habit. Essays like “A Note to the Childless on Mother’s Day” show her turning personal milestones and social expectations into reflective pieces that speak to readers in similar situations.
This cluster of travel, health, and personal essays marks her as a writer who uses her own experience as the narrative engine, while bringing in specialists and specific locations to ground the story.
Editorial leadership and curated packages
Monico’s official role as director of creative projects and digital editor means she sits at the center of the magazine’s digital storytelling. Magazine materials describe her as a managing figure in the digital operation, and editorial roundups cite her by name when discussing key series such as her dating column that explored the local dating scene in depth.
She regularly fronts and supports major packages, including marketing and voting toolkits for the “Best of San Diego” Reader’s Choice Awards, where she walks businesses and readers through nomination windows, voting timelines, and promotional strategies.
She has also overseen or contributed to retrospective projects like “The Good, the Bad, and the Ridiculous Covers of SDM’s Past,” in which she helps sift through hundreds of past covers to identify the standouts and the more questionable experiments. Collections of the magazine’s “best articles” of a given year call out her work alongside that of other staffers, situating her dating series and features within the outlet’s core editorial identity. Across these responsibilities, she operates as both a creator and a curator, shaping how food, love, travel, and wellness stories are presented and packaged for the magazine’s audience.
Throughout her body of work, Monico’s distinguishing thread is the way she fuses first-person narrative with service journalism: restaurant openings tied to lived nights out, dating columns linked to specific pools and bars, and wellness stories grounded in trips, technologies, and experts. That mix gives her coverage a personal, place-based texture that goes beyond a generic food or lifestyle beat.
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.