Poet Wolfe
Poet Wolfe covers food and dining through the lens of Gulf Coast culture as a Gulf Coast reporter and staff writer for The Times-Picayune | NOLA.com. Her work stands out for the way it treats restaurants, bars and food traditions as entry points into the wider stories of place, history and community along the Gulf Coast. She is presented to audiences by the outlet as its Gulf Coast reporter, and her food pieces sit alongside broader regional coverage of travel, infrastructure and community life.
Gulf Coast restaurants and long-running traditions
Wolfe frequently focuses on restaurants whose identities are built on rituals and longevity, using food coverage to document how these places shape everyday life on the Gulf Coast. In one feature, she reports on a famed Gulf Coast restaurant known for throwing yeast rolls to diners, framing the story around visiting the place and experiencing the decades-old practice for the first time. Her coverage of this dining room highlights the sensory details of the meal and the choreography of the tradition, as well as the way regulars and newcomers share the space.
She brings the same attention to history and continuity to a profile of Miss Shirley, a cook who has been an anchor of New Orleans dining for 50 years. In that piece, Wolfe traces Miss Shirley’s half-century in local kitchens, presenting her as the matriarch behind a beloved establishment and showing how one person’s cooking career becomes part of the city’s culinary fabric. Visual coverage of places like Big Bad Breakfast in Miramar Beach, Florida further underlines her interest in breakfast and comfort food on the Gulf Coast, pairing images of plates and interiors with reporting that situates the restaurant in a regional travel and dining circuit. Across these stories, her food reporting is built around first-hand visits and clear, narrative profiles of the people and practices that keep long-running restaurants alive.
Dive bars, nightlife and stories behind the doors
Wolfe also reports on bars and nightlife institutions, treating them as cultural landmarks and exploring the decisions and personalities that created them. In her story on the New Orleans dive Check Point Charlie, she investigates the history behind the bar and asks why its founder, Igor Margan, opened the venue in the first place. The piece combines origin-story reporting with a look at the bar’s role in the city’s nightlife, showing how a seemingly modest dive becomes part of the local entertainment and dining landscape.
Her restaurant and bar coverage often follows this format: starting from a specific place, then widening out to explain what the venue means to regulars, workers and the surrounding neighborhood. That approach gives even straightforward openings and features a strong narrative thread, making them useful for stories that need the context of how a concept fits into the Gulf Coast’s existing bar and restaurant scene.
Food, travel and the wider Gulf Coast
Beyond individual venues, Wolfe writes food-adjacent features that connect dining to travel and the built environment along the Gulf Coast. In her piece on Seaside, Florida—the beach town where “The Truman Show” was filmed—she visits the community and asks whether the real place resembles the movie, using the question as a way to describe what it is like to stay, eat and spend time there. The article pairs pop culture with on-the-ground observation of the town’s atmosphere, giving readers a sense of both its visual character and its role as a Gulf Coast destination.
Coverage of Gulf Coast infrastructure, such as Amtrak’s passenger numbers on the Mardi Gras route, shows her interest in how people move through the region and reach its towns and restaurants. Paired with images and notes from coastal eateries like Big Bad Breakfast, these stories frame food as one element of a broader travel experience that includes transportation, tourism and day-to-day regional life. This mix of dining, travel and service reporting makes her a fit for stories that sit at the intersection of food coverage and Gulf Coast destination or lifestyle narratives.
Food within Gulf Coast history and community reporting
Wolfe’s food writing is informed by broader reporting on Gulf Coast communities and their history. She has co-written work on life along the Gulf Coast 20 years after Hurricane Katrina, contrasting places that have thrived with neighboring bayou towns still struggling to hold on. That long-view understanding of community resilience and disparity adds depth to her coverage of restaurants and bars, which often serve as gathering spaces in the same towns.
In another feature, she profiles the creator of an AI database built to answer questions about New Orleans history, including archived newspapers. The story connects technology, archives and local memory, underscoring her interest in how the region’s past is preserved and accessed. When she writes about long-running dining rooms, iconic cooks and enduring food traditions, that historical awareness runs through the work, framing food as part of a documented and evolving Gulf Coast story rather than an isolated consumer topic.
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.