Noelle Alviz-Gransee
Noelle Alviz-Gransee covers the intersection of food, business and local culture, tracking how new restaurants, grocery stores and retail concepts reshape how people eat and shop in the Kansas City area. She is a food, arts and business reporter at The Kansas City Star, working across the living, local and business sections. Her work leans on clear, practical details that matter to customers and owners alike, from hours and pricing to concept, location and expansion plans.
Restaurants, Grocers and Everyday Food Choices
Food coverage sits at the core of Alviz-Gransee’s beat, with regular stories on new restaurant concepts, national franchises and the practical side of eating in Kansas City. She reports on chains such as Joe’s Kansas City Bar-B-Que changing their Sunday schedule during major events, explaining how decisions about hours and staffing connect to surges in foot traffic.
Her pieces on a new discount grocery store in a Kansas City suburb spell out construction timelines, expected opening dates and how the addition fits into the wider network of Aldi locations across the area.
She checks prices on staples like ground beef ahead of holidays, comparing costs across local stores so readers can plan a cookout with up-to-date information. Franchise stories on chicken tender brands, Mediterranean eateries, coffee trailers and chicken salad spots show how she approaches openings with a consumer lens, outlining menus, formats and where each business fits in the local food landscape.
Openings, Closings and Retail Business Coverage
Alviz-Gransee is a regular presence on The Star’s business “openings and closings” coverage, chronicling how new retail and hospitality ventures arrive, grow and sometimes return after a hiatus.
She has written on a luxury clothing brand planning to open in the Country Club Plaza, focusing on timing, placement and what the store adds to the existing mix of tenants. Coverage of a Japanese department store coming to Overland Park follows the same pattern: straightforward details on where it will be located, when it will open and how its format differs from familiar local retailers.
When Afterword Tavern reopened on Gillham Road, she documented the reopening date, concept and role in the neighborhood bar scene rather than leaning on opinion or nostalgia. Across these pieces she treats business moves - leases, expansions, new builds and reopenings - as concrete developments, giving readers enough specifics to understand how the local retail map is shifting.
Bookstores and Cultural Spaces
Alongside food and retail, Alviz-Gransee spends significant time on bookstores and related cultural spaces, treating them as businesses and as part of the region’s arts ecosystem. Her guide to 22 independent bookstores in the Kansas City area combines short portraits of each shop with practical information, highlighting details such as a romance-focused store and even elements like shop cats and cheesecake.
She has tracked the growth of Monstera’s Books in Overland Park through lease agreements and expansion news, showing how a small business scales into a larger footprint. Stories on new specialty bookstores, including a mystery, horror and true crime shop and a fantasy and sci-fi book store set to open on Halloween, emphasize niche focus, ownership and planned hours while keeping the tone factual and concise.
In these pieces, Alviz-Gransee treats bookstores much like restaurants or retailers: concepts to be described precisely, with attention to how they operate day to day.
Breaking News Background
Before moving into food, arts and business coverage, Alviz-Gransee worked as a breaking news reporter at The Kansas City Star.
During that period she covered fatal crashes, including a motorcycle slamming into a van and incidents on highways, focusing on verified details such as location, time, victim status and initial police information. She has reported on structural failures such as a partial dollar store collapse, summarizing what is known at the scene and what authorities are investigating.
This background shows in the precision of her current work: even softer subjects like restaurant openings or bookstore guides are framed with clear sourcing, firm timelines and careful language around what is confirmed.
Professional Experience
Across her author biographies in The Star, Alviz-Gransee is identified as a reporter who has previously written for regional and investigative outlets, including the Des Moines Register, the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism, The Missourian, Startland News and Missouri Business Alert. That mix of daily, business and investigative environments aligns with the way she approaches the food and business beat: she treats new ventures, pricing stories and cultural spaces as news subjects, not lifestyle features. Her portfolio at The Kansas City Star now spans accident coverage, business openings, grocery and restaurant reporting, price checks and cultural guides, giving her a broad view of how daily life and commerce intersect in the area she covers.
4 more food journalists.
Aaron Guerrero
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Aarron Fleming
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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.