Sophia Voight
Sophia Voight connects Delaware’s food scene with the growth and disruption shaping local businesses and community life at Delaware News Journal, where she works as a growth and development reporter. Her coverage sits at the intersection of restaurants, food systems, business development and public safety, tracking how openings, closures, grants and inspections affect where and how people eat. She moves between service-oriented guides, incident reports and explanatory pieces, with a consistent focus on practical detail and local impact.
Restaurant openings and dining value
Voight regularly reports on new food and drink concepts, treating restaurant and café openings as indicators of broader shifts in Delaware’s dining landscape.
Her coverage of Maíz, a restaurant built around traditional Mexican dishes paired with gourmet flavors, follows the same pattern as her story on Boba Mantra, a boba tea shop bringing playful drink combinations to Brandywine Hundred. She highlights where these businesses are located, what makes their menus distinct and how they fit into existing corridors of development and commerce.
Value and affordability are recurring threads: she writes about upcoming weeks of specially priced restaurant dinners, framing them as dining deals that create access to higher-end experiences at lower cost. In list-driven formats, she gathers options into one place, such as a guide to 32 Delaware food trucks to try in the fall, organizing the mobile food scene into a usable roadmap for eating around the state. Even at large events, she stays close to what is available on the plate, producing a visual tour of “sweet, savory, and fried” favorites at the Delaware State Fair.
Inspections, safety and food access programs
Beyond openings and menus, Voight follows the regulatory and structural side of food, with sustained attention to inspections and access.
She writes about a statewide restaurant inspections database, explaining how it tracks violations for thousands of licensed food establishments, including restaurants, food trucks, grocery stores and institutional kitchens. Her inspection pieces identify which New Castle County restaurants have accumulated the most violations over a recent 30-day window, translating technical reports into clear rankings and naming specific establishments.
On the policy and program side, she covers state funding aimed at expanding healthy food access, such as a story on Delaware awarding $712,500 through grocery and food system initiatives. That work details the grant amounts, the number of recipients and the types of organizations involved, from farmers and independent grocers to food banks and school garden programs. She notes how individual grants help expand offerings like fresh fruit distribution or school-based gardens, tying bureaucratic decisions to concrete changes in what communities can eat.
Business growth, venues and development
Voight’s growth and development beat extends beyond traditional restaurants to include leisure venues and hospitality-focused businesses.
Her coverage of a state-of-the-art indoor golf simulator lounge in Hockessin shows how she treats new attractions as part of the local economic and social fabric, specifying what the facility offers, how membership works and how nearby restaurants and pizza shops function as de facto partners for food. In newsroom features that highlight reporters’ own interests, she is identified in the context of exploring Delaware’s natural and recreational spaces, reinforcing her orientation toward how people experience place and leisure.
That perspective carries into stories where businesses intersect with infrastructure and safety, such as her report on an Ogletown Two Stones Pub closing after a car drove through the building. In that piece, she tracks the immediate operational impact on the pub while situating the incident within wider questions about development, traffic and the resilience of local establishments.
Incidents, storms and their impact on food venues
Voight frequently covers crashes and severe weather, with attention to how they disrupt restaurants, markets and food festivals.
Her reporting on a nor’easter documents beach closures and event cancellations across Delaware, listing affected venues such as the Historic Lewes Farmers Market, Patsy’s Restaurant in Bethany Beach and the Delaware Taco Festival, along with rescheduled dates and closure notices. She uses concise bullet points and timelines to track when markets will return and when festivals will be moved, making it easy to understand both immediate disruption and future plans. In public safety stories, she reports on fatal crashes with direct links to food businesses, including an 80-year-old who died after a truck crashed into a Fenwick Island pizzeria and a separate collision near Bridgeville that killed two people.
These articles combine essential crash details with information about the affected establishments, showing how sudden incidents can shutter or damage places that anchor local dining. Across storm coverage and accident reporting, she keeps the focus on the operational status of venues, the people involved and the timeline for recovery or closure, reinforcing her broader theme of how external shocks ripple through Delaware’s food and business landscape.
4 more food journalists.
Aaron Guerrero
Aaron Guerrero is head of the digital department at Miami’s Community Newspapers, where he pairs restaurant coverage with community-facing content. He focuses on how Miami-area restaurants evolve, celebrate, and experiment through new concepts, menus, and neighborhood-focused dining experiences. He reports on restaurant openings, such as an Italian food hall at Plaza Coral Gables, new executive lunch menus, and wood-fired Latin steakhouse brunches, explaining what sets each venue apart. He also covers awards, like a Wine Spectator honor for an Italian chophouse, and events that turn dining rooms into social hubs. His bylines extend to features on sports-themed gatherings, civic renamings, local visits to restaurant programs, sponsored community pieces, and official notices. His work is straightforward and descriptive, helping readers and local businesses connect around specific openings, promotions, and dining experiences.
Aarron Fleming
Aarron Fleming reports on how courts, jails and public safety systems work over time. He is a reporter at The Daily Memphian covering public safety, the local court system, suburban news and business developments in North Mississippi. His work follows trials, sentencing, appeals, plea deals and judicial decisions, including major cases tied to Tyre Nichols and rapper Young Dolph. He also covers jail conditions, inmate deaths, crime data, prosecution units, trafficking, shootings and public-order incidents. His suburban reporting examines cannabis businesses, restaurant openings and how commercial growth affects communities such as Olive Branch. Fleming previously covered education in the same newsroom. He uses clear, unadorned prose to explain legal steps, deadlines, institutional problems and the political, commercial and community effects of public-safety decisions.
Alana Al-Hatlani
Alana Al-Hatlani is a food writer and editor who treats recipes, restaurants, and food features as ways to explore culture, community, and the business of eating. She works on the food team at Southern Living, overseeing and contributing to print recipes and reported features. Her pastry-focused, restaurant-tested perspective comes from time in restaurant and bakery kitchens. She helps plan and write monthly food packages, including “The South’s Most Treasured Desserts,” and wrote “8 Summer Recipes Our Editors Make Every Year.” She also writes recipe tips, ingredient explainers, restaurant guides, and reported stories about workers, owners, and communities. Her subjects include regional specialties, dining scenes, kitchen basics, and food industries. Her work has appeared with OpenTable and Yahoo. She reports on the ground, explains techniques clearly, and connects specific dishes and places to larger stories about food and livelihood.
Alana Edgin
Alana Edgin is a business reporter whose strongest focus is food, restaurants and consumer-facing businesses. She works at the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal and has also had work syndicated across AOL and Yahoo News. She covers new openings, closings, expansions and franchise growth, along with retail, health, services, corporate news, data incidents, business support programs and sponsorships. Her reporting includes detailed roundups of new restaurants and businesses, coverage of El Pollo Loco’s opening, and stories on burger trucks, dessert shops, Vietnamese sandwich restaurants and gourmet markets. She also contributes to food and drink reviews, including fall coffee and jerky comparisons. Edgin reports with practical “what, when, where” details, structured comparisons and clear explanations of how offers, partnerships and business changes affect consumers and the local economy.