Simone Joseph
Simone Joseph covers how neighbourhood businesses, restaurants and community events shape everyday life, with food stories that sit inside a wider circuit of local culture and small enterprise for York Region.
Neighborhood Eats and restaurant spotlights
She works as a part-time reporter and writes about new businesses while highlighting notable restaurants through York Region’s Neighborhood Eats coverage. Her food pieces focus on the character of local spots and the details that make them distinctive, such as fresh, homemade pasta at Italian restaurant Folco’s Ristorante in Markham. She treats restaurant profiles as community stories, emphasizing owners’ backgrounds, signature dishes and the way each venue fits into its street or plaza rather than only reviewing menus. Her tone is straightforward and descriptive, giving readers enough context to understand why a restaurant matters in its neighbourhood and what kind of experience they can expect.
New businesses and local entrepreneurs
Beyond restaurants, Simone consistently reports on new businesses opening across the region, framing them as part of the local economic and social fabric. These stories introduce readers to independent operators and small enterprises, often explaining what gap a new shop or service is filling and how it adds to the mix of existing businesses. Her coverage highlights practical details such as what a business offers and where it is located, but she also gives space to the founders’ motivations and the origins of their ideas. Through this work she tracks how commercial streets and suburban centres evolve, showing how food ventures sit alongside other community-facing businesses.
Community events and seasonal guides
Simone regularly produces “things to do” roundups that list activities and events happening across York Region, including outdoor festivals, family programs and cultural observances. Her guides to outdoor activities point readers to events such as bike day pop-ups and artisan festivals, providing a mix of recreation and local shopping. She covers seasonal moments with service-driven pieces, such as March break guides that compile science, skating and dancing activities for children and families in different municipalities. Her work on Earth Day and Black History Month presents multiple events in a single article, making it easy to see how environmental themes or Black history programming are being marked around the region. She also reports on exhibits and events honouring Jewish Heritage Month in Vaughan, connecting civic commemorations to specific venues and displays. Across these stories, the format is concise and list-based, but she still notes the people and organizations behind the programming.
Books, arts and local storytelling
Alongside food and events coverage, Simone frequently writes about local authors, books and literary initiatives, extending her interest in neighbourhood stories into the arts. She has profiled Thornhill and Vaughan writers, including a Vaughan author who began writing a children’s book at age 10 and now produces books for readers aged four to eight. Her article on a York Region teacher’s book about immigration and language acquisition focuses on a young girl’s journey to becoming trilingual, blending education themes with personal narrative. She reports on community-led literary projects such as a Newmarket resident launching a writers’ conference and Markham’s plan for a city-wide book club, showing how reading and writing are encouraged at the local level. In the arts arena she also covers initiatives like free Tuesdays at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, explaining access-focused programs and their timelines for visitors. These pieces reinforce her pattern of following creative work that grows out of the same communities she covers in food and business stories.
People, places and issues across community newspapers
Simone writes about people, places and issues for York Region, moving between food, events, arts and everyday local concerns. Her bylines appear across several of the outlet’s community newspapers, where she adapts the same focus on neighbourhood detail to different towns and city wards. Whether profiling a restaurant, outlining a festival lineup or introducing a new book, she keeps her reporting grounded in clear description and direct quotes from local sources. The result is a body of work that helps readers see how small businesses, cultural programs and individual creators together define the texture of life in the communities she covers.
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.