Rebecca 'Becca' Dyer

Rebecca “Becca” Dyer covers food with a copy desk rigor that puts safety, regulation and real-world experience at the center of what she writes for The Arizona Republic. Her work moves between restaurant criticism, inspection and recall reporting, and practical guides, so dining out, grocery shopping and even inflight snacking sit on the same continuum of what Arizonans actually eat and drink. Across those formats, she returns to clear facts from county records, federal regulators and lived visits, turning them into straightforward, usable coverage of metro Phoenix’s food landscape.

Restaurant criticism and dining guides in metro Phoenix

Dyer serves as The Arizona Republic’s restaurant critic, laying out an approach that combines concise first impressions with deeper, multi-visit reviews of metro Phoenix restaurants. In her critic’s manifesto, she explains that she plans to report over multiple visits in order to understand how restaurants evolve and shape the wider culinary scene, pairing those long reads with shorter “First Bite” dispatches that give quick, early looks at openings.

That mix is reflected in her guide-style pieces, such as a column highlighting three metro Phoenix restaurants to try first, where only one is a true newcomer and the others are singled out because they have “found their rhythm” and merit a second look. She also assembles broader roundups, including a feature on 10 Arizona Mexican restaurants that landed on a national list of top Mexican spots, which she uses to examine how local institutions fit into wider debates over ranking and recognition.

Seasonal guides like her newsletter-driven list of 18 cold treats treat the desert heat as a frame for recommending specific ice creams, shaved ices and other desserts, grounding each pick in what it offers as a “favorite” way to cope with summer. Her story on Bill Johnson’s Big Apple fits the same pattern, revisiting a once-iconic Western-themed restaurant to explain how its mix of hearty food and kitsch created a lasting imprint on local dining.

Food safety, inspections and recalls

A defining strand of Dyer’s food coverage is systematic reporting on restaurant and grocery store health inspections in Maricopa County. In one investigation, she surfaces nine metro Phoenix restaurants with the most priority health violations in 2026, detailing issues such as moldy produce, expired foods, leaking raw eggs, contaminated vegetables and repeated handwashing failures, and organizes those findings so diners can see which establishments had the longest violation lists. Complementary pieces zero in on weekly inspection cycles, including a story about two Asian restaurants cited for eight violations apiece, with problems like unsanitized dishwashing, food debris left on knives and buffet foods held at unsafe temperatures spelled out in plain terms. She extends the same lens to grocery and convenience stores, documenting cases where inspectors found vegetables being washed in strong chemicals, unlabeled carne seca sold without a USDA stamp, and food held in broken coolers or near clogged drains with standing water.

These stories rely on Maricopa County Environmental Services records and explain how the agency regulates grocery stores, convenience stores and gas stations that sell prepared food under the same rules as restaurants, turning regulatory language into understandable narratives about what went wrong and where. Dyer pushes the safety focus beyond inspections into recall coverage, compiling lists of recalled food items Arizonans should avoid, from cheese and beef to pasta, flour and frozen berries flagged by federal regulators.

In those recall roundups she identifies products, explains why they were pulled - such as contamination concerns and high-risk warnings from the Food and Drug Administration - and emphasizes the practical step of not buying or consuming items from specific lots.

Food shopping, inflight snacks and consumer service

Dyer’s beat extends into everyday food decisions, including grocery shopping and travel snacks. Her work on recalled products and grocery store violations is structured as service journalism for shoppers, laying out which brands, stores and dates are involved so people can make informed choices at the meat counter, deli case or frozen foods aisle. She approaches airline food the same way, profiling the inflight snack rotation on a major carrier and noting the introduction of specific items like chocolate chip cookies and a sweet-and-savory snack mix that won favor with Arizona travelers.

Across these pieces, she treats packaged foods, restaurant meals and convenience-store offerings as part of one ecosystem, giving attention to both taste and trust - what something is like to eat and whether it is being handled safely.

Arizona history, sports and landmarks

Alongside food, Dyer regularly writes features that tie Arizona history and sports into the same narrative framework of place. Her story on a major Phoenix park explores the site’s current role hosting large events while tracing its roots back to a darker institutional past, showing the continuity between contemporary use and earlier history.

In baseball coverage, she writes about the Arizona Diamondbacks’ “Battle-Backs” moniker, arguing that the team’s on-field resilience merits the nickname and using it to explore the franchise’s identity, and pens a separate feature on Nolan Arenado’s effort to defy age, mixing performance analysis with long-term perspective. Her history writing reaches beyond Phoenix into the University of Arizona, where a piece on Wilbur the Wildcat reconstructs how the mascot and school traditions developed after the university opened in 1885.

Biographical notes in these stories describe her as a copy editor and online producer for The Arizona Republic who closely follows the Diamondbacks and welcomes tips about Arizona history, underscoring that her reported features grow out of a production role that keeps her close to both archival material and current coverage.