Peter Hum
Peter Hum brings a long, cross-beat newsroom background to restaurant criticism, using deep reporting and a clear, consumer-first style to map restaurants, dining culture and food events with unusual precision. His coverage sits at the intersection of eating out, arts and lived experience, drawing on decades at the Ottawa Citizen and a parallel career in jazz to give dining stories texture beyond the plate. He focuses on how restaurants work for diners in practice, from menus and pricing to atmosphere and service, and on the role that food plays in the wider cultural life of a city.
Restaurant Reviews and Openings
Hum is the restaurant critic at the Ottawa Citizen, where he reviews restaurants and tracks openings and changes in the local dining scene. His work includes coverage of established venues returning under new ownership, such as the reopening of New Yangtze Restaurant in Chinatown, and situates individual dining rooms in the broader history of their neighbourhoods. He treats restaurant coverage as reported journalism rather than lifestyle filler, incorporating operational detail, ownership context and the practical realities of eating there into his reviews.
Beyond formal reviews, he covers news around the food business, including events and disruptions that affect how and where people can eat out.
His reporting on the cancellation of Capital Ribfest due to construction at Festival Plaza shows his interest in the logistics and policy decisions that shape the city’s food festivals. That mix of restaurant-level detail and event coverage means he often connects what diners experience on a given weekend to the decisions of organizers and civic authorities.
Best Restaurants and Dining Guides
Hum regularly curates and contributes to best-restaurant roundups and guides, extending his beat beyond single reviews into broader rankings and recommendations. For the “Ottawa Citizen Best Restaurants 2026” event, he selected a menu that combined fine-dining venues with lesser-known spots, signalling a focus on both marquee names and “hidden gems” in his evaluations.
The event’s link to a charitable partner, the Ottawa Food Bank, reflects how he connects restaurant coverage to the city’s wider food ecosystem and issues around access.
His guides are grounded in many years of eating across the local restaurant landscape, described in his biography and in pieces that note his long-standing dedication to sampling the region’s culinary offerings.
In recent years he has extended that perspective to restaurants in other countries, bringing comparative context to discussions of local dining standards and trends. When he writes about standout restaurants, he tends to frame them in terms of craft, consistency and the experience they deliver over time, rather than fleeting novelty.
Dining Dilemmas and Reader Q&A
Hum’s food coverage is unusually interactive, with regular formats that invite readers to bring him their dining problems and questions. He has hosted live “concierge hours” where he solves “real-world dining dilemmas,” offering specific restaurant suggestions tailored to constraints like price, occasion and dietary needs.
A recent reader Q&A session, promoted as “Restaurant critic Peter Hum takes reader questions on Jan. 26,” illustrates how he uses his beat knowledge to give direct, actionable guidance rather than generic lists.
These reader-facing formats show that he prioritises utility and clarity: he responds to concrete scenarios, explains why particular restaurants fit the brief, and folds in up-to-date information about openings, closures and changing kitchen teams. They also reinforce his role as a long-term point of reference on where to eat, building a feedback loop between his reporting and the issues diners raise.
Arts, Jazz and Long-Form Features
Hum’s restaurant criticism is informed by a broader career in arts and general news reporting, including earlier work on education, crime, city hall, courts and technology beats.
He has written extensively about jazz and arts, and has blogged on jazz for the Citizen, giving him a practiced eye for performance and atmosphere that carries over into his descriptions of dining rooms and hospitality. His parallel life as a jazz pianist and composer, with multiple albums of original music, adds another layer to his sense of craft and collaboration in the cultural spaces he covers.
Hum also writes longer, more personal features that connect food to travel and family history, including a piece on his own journey that drew more than 100 emails from readers. Profiles and interviews about his work describe him as a veteran, award-winning journalist who has reported from cities including Hong Kong, New York, San Francisco, London, Amsterdam, Hannover and Eastern Slovakia, and then returned to focus on arts and life coverage and restaurant criticism. That mix of hard-news experience, arts writing and musical practice distinguishes his restaurant coverage from more generic food writing, giving his pieces a clear sense of narrative, place and lived context.
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.