Samantha Maxwell

Samantha Maxwell focuses on how everyday foods, restaurants, and home kitchens reflect broader food culture, connecting practical advice with clear context for readers across the food world.

At Tasting Table, she writes service-driven features that span ranked taste tests, grocery and restaurant guidance, etiquette explainers, sustainability advice, and deep dives into classic and sometimes overlooked dishes.

Ranked taste tests and supermarket staples

Maxwell frequently evaluates packaged foods and condiments through comparative taste tests, giving detailed, sensory-driven feedback that helps readers navigate crowded shelves. Her ranking of six butter pecan ice cream brands from worst to best fits alongside pieces where she tastes and ranks six store-bought French onion dips, focusing on texture, flavor, and overall eating experience. She also leads investigations into pantry shortcuts, such as identifying the hands-down best Better Than Bouillon flavor after testing seven popular options, emphasizing real roast chicken flavor and versatility.

Her supermarket coverage extends into warehouse-club shopping, where she highlights strategic bulk buys and the quirks of prepared food offerings. In stories on condiments to always buy in bulk at Costco and facts about Costco food court pizza that only dedicated fans would know, she treats mass-market staples with the same attention to detail she gives specialty foods, framing them as part of how people realistically eat and shop. Across these pieces, Maxwell’s distinguishing trait is a willingness to taste broadly and judge precisely, translating careful product testing into straightforward recommendations.

Chain restaurants, food courts, and dining etiquette

Beyond grocery aisles, Maxwell looks closely at chain restaurants and food courts, often through the lens of customer experience and expectations. Her examination of frequent customer complaints about Olive Garden parses themes like food quality, pricing, Americanized menu choices, and even the texture of the chain’s redesigned breadsticks, drawing on diner reviews and employee accounts to map how perception shapes a brand’s reputation. In her Costco food court coverage, she similarly leans into fan culture and operational details, situating familiar chains as important fixtures in contemporary dining.

She also writes about how people conduct themselves when they eat out, with a practical focus on behavior rather than aspirational fine dining. Her solo dining etiquette guide covers tipping norms, interacting with staff, appropriate use of laptops, alcohol boundaries, and basic table manners, built around advice from etiquette consultants and hospitality professionals. This mix of chain-restaurant scrutiny and etiquette service distinguishes her beat: she treats accessible, everyday dining as worthy of analysis, and uses expert voices to clarify what respectful, enjoyable restaurant experiences look like.

Wine, memoirs, and food culture writing

Maxwell’s work also delves into wine and the broader culture of food writing, often positioning these subjects within geography and storytelling. Her beginner’s guide to wine in New York’s Finger Lakes region explains the area’s eleven lakes, local grape varieties, and scenic appeal, translating a regional wine scene into approachable entry points for curious drinkers. She writes about wine for publications such as SevenFifty Daily, including coverage of Albanian wine that stresses changing production patterns and emerging opportunities in lesser-known regions.

Her interest in narrative-driven food culture comes through in her curated list of fifteen food memoirs to add to a to-be-read list, where she maps how classic and contemporary books have shaped understandings of cuisine and culinary careers. She also tackles historically rich or polarizing foods in pieces like her explainer on aspic, tracing its labor-intensive preparation, mid-20th-century popularity, and modern reinterpretations that treat the gelatinous dish as both haute cuisine and a medium for culinary art. In other outlets, she writes about organ meats as a sustainability-minded option for meat lovers, connecting offal consumption to environmental and cultural questions. Across wine, memoirs, and heritage dishes, Maxwell distinguishes herself by connecting taste to history and place, showing how food and drink participate in wider cultural conversations.

Kitchen sustainability, cleaning, and resourcefulness

A recurring strand in Maxwell’s work is practical environmentalism in the home kitchen, framed through achievable changes rather than abstract policy. In her guide to reducing plastic waste in the kitchen, she relies on zero-waste expertise to advocate bulk buying, cooking from scratch, reusing existing tools instead of over-purchasing new “eco” products, and embracing alternatives like glass straws, composting, and creative storage methods that avoid plastic wrap. She emphasizes thinking about plastic reduction holistically, linking everyday choices to broader household sustainability.

Her domestic service pieces frequently repurpose common items and food scraps for cleaning, reinforcing a theme of thrift and ingenuity. Articles on food scraps that double as cleaning powerhouses and a smarter way to clean an oven with paper towels focus on low-cost, low-waste solutions that fit ordinary kitchens. Taken together with her environmental coverage at other outlets, these stories show Maxwell treating sustainability and resourcefulness as integral parts of the way people cook and care for their homes, not as niche concerns separate from mainstream food writing.

Alongside her work for Tasting Table, Maxwell writes about food, wine, restaurants, environment, and culture on a freelance basis for publications including FoodPrint, Modern Farmer, SevenFifty Daily, Paste Magazine, and other outlets, maintaining a consistent focus on the intersection of taste, everyday practice, and larger food systems.