Reia Li

Reia Li is an Arizona Life reporter at The Arizona Republic who covers how food, money and retail shape everyday life, with a particular focus on Asian and Asian American culture in the Southwest. Her reporting connects restaurant openings, small businesses and consumer trends to deeper questions of history, identity and economic reality. She treats food coverage as a way to explain how different communities live, work and belong.

Food, money and how Arizonans dine

Li’s core beat sits at the intersection of food, the economy and development, and she describes her job as helping people live their best life through stories about what they eat and where they spend. She covers new and notable food businesses, such as a Founding Fathers-themed ice cream parlor making its Arizona debut, using openings as a way to explore branding, nostalgia and local appetite for novelty. She also reports on dining data and consumer studies, including a story on how much Arizonans tip at restaurants that highlighted the state’s low average gratuity and what that means for workers and hospitality culture. In another piece, she broke down national satisfaction rankings showing that Chick-fil-A was no longer the top fast food chain in the United States, using survey results to explain shifting preferences and the broader quick-service landscape. Across these stories, she moves beyond listicles or simple reviews, translating numbers and trends into clear takeaways about how people in her coverage area eat, spend and experience dining.

Asian and Asian American stories told through restaurants and markets

A defining thread in Li’s work is her focus on Asian and Asian American life and culture, especially as expressed through restaurants and food businesses. She has written deeply reported features on long-standing Chinese restaurants and their owners, including a story about an iconic metro Phoenix Chinese restaurant that turned 50, examining why the family behind it kept going even when retirement was an option. In another feature on the last noodlemaker from Phoenix’s lost Chinatown, she used one craftsman’s work with noodles to recover the history of a vanished neighborhood and the community that once surrounded it. Her coverage of a beloved Japanese market that operates as a ‘90s time capsule—with no internet or computers and a still-functioning fax machine—profiles the woman who has spent her life running it and situates the shop within Japanese and Japanese American presence in the area. Beyond The Arizona Republic, she has written about events like the Chinese Chorizo Festival, linking sausage to Tucson’s unique Chinese Mexican immigrant history and showing how hybrid dishes carry complex migration stories. Taken together, these pieces show a reporter who uses food businesses as narrative anchors for immigration, memory and the evolution of Asian and Asian American communities.

History, identity and nightlife

Li extends her interest in marginalized histories into coverage of nightlife and queer spaces. In a feature on Phoenix’s lesbian bars, she traced the long history of these establishments back to at least 1941 and wrote about how the reporting process affected her, framing bar culture as a site of community, resilience and change over time. That story treats the search for lesbian bars as more than a lifestyle roundup, intertwining archival research, oral histories and personal reflection to show how nightlife venues reflect shifting attitudes toward gender and sexuality. Her work in this area fits with a broader pattern: using specific places—bars, restaurants, markets—as entry points to document social history and the ways identity groups have carved out space for themselves.

Narrative features with visual and multiplatform storytelling

Li primarily works in feature formats, often building her stories around the lives of owners, workers and patrons rather than around a single dish. Her profiles of restaurants and markets emphasize long-term commitment, generational change and the emotional stakes of running a food business, which distinguishes her coverage from generic openings lists or short business briefs. She also contributes to the publication’s dining coverage in video form, appearing in short reels that introduce places like Little Szechuan in Tempe and Chubby Skewers in Mesa, where she uses on-camera reporting to highlight the owners, the food and the cultural context behind each restaurant. Professional descriptions of her role underline that she is both a food writer and a reporter covering economy and development, which helps explain why her pieces often blend human-interest storytelling with clear explanations of market forces, gentrification pressures and the financial realities of running a restaurant. Whether she is writing about a niche ice cream concept, a decades-old Chinese restaurant or tipping percentages, her work stays grounded in ordinary people and the structures that shape their choices.