Stephanie Allmon Merry
Stephanie Allmon Merry connects restaurant openings, food-driven events, and the gala circuit into a single lifestyle and culture thread on CultureMap’s Dallas site. As editorial director, she oversees content across the brand’s city platforms while continuing to write feature and service journalism herself. Her coverage tracks how new concepts, charitable organizations, and cultural institutions present themselves to the public, with a consistent focus on venue specifics, brand positioning, and the tone of an occasion. She works primarily in short features, event roundups, and society dispatches that turn openings and fundraisers into clear, time-specific, and detail-rich stories.
Restaurants + Bars openings and food events
On the restaurants and bars beat, Allmon Merry’s work spotlights openings, relocations, and flagship concepts in the local dining scene. Her coverage of Torchy’s Tacos’ new location in the 23Springs development treats the restaurant as a “big-deal” arrival, emphasizing its role as an upscale flagship, square footage, corner placement, and how the design aligns with the surrounding office tower and freestanding restaurant buildings. She situates the chain within its broader growth arc, noting its presence across multiple states and tallying how many units operate in the Dallas–Fort Worth market at the time of opening.
She extends that approach to roundups of openings and closings, where concepts like a chef-driven Wagyu burger spot and new Torchy’s locations are presented with concise descriptions of menu focus, service format, and local footprint. Her story on an Austin-born sushi restaurant expanding to Dallas highlights the brand’s “upscale” positioning, the specific address in a Highland Park retail center, and a simultaneous relocation of the original location, giving readers a full picture of the business move rather than a single-site update.
In a recurring food-events format, such as weekly “8 best food & drink events” pieces, she lists grand openings, tastings, and special dinners with exact dates, times, addresses, and key draws - Ribbon cuttings, DJs, photo booths, giveaways, and even perks like free queso for the first 100 guests at Torchy’s Uptown debut are spelled out for readers.
Across these stories, the reporting is practical and promotional at once: chains and independent concepts get context about their brand story, while logistical information - parking, patios, square footage, and what is served - remains central. The emphasis on “flagship” status, prototype design, and market counts makes her restaurant coverage especially useful for understanding how a concept fits into the broader culinary landscape, not just where it has opened.
Society galas and luncheons
Allmon Merry is a core voice in CultureMap’s Society vertical, where she chronicles galas, luncheons, and fundraising parties in a structured, event-report format. Stories typically open with WHAT, WHERE, and THE 411 segments, anchoring each piece in the event’s name, venue, and high-level purpose before moving into narrative detail. Her coverage of the Farrah Fawcett Foundation’s annual Tex-Mex Fiesta, for example, describes the star-studded gathering, its beneficiaries Stand Up To Cancer and the American Cancer Society’s Hope Lodge, and ties the evening to milestones in Farrah Fawcett’s career and advocacy.
Chairs, honorary chairs, and notable guests are named, and the flow of the evening - from margaritas and mariachi to dinner, auction, and awards - is mapped out step by step.
Similarly, her report on the Art for Advocacy gala for Dallas Children’s Advocacy Center foregrounds attendance numbers, the event’s age, and the fundraising total of nearly $1.2 million, then moves through hosts, chairs, curatorial leads, and the mix of auctions and art experiences that defined the night. In the Society index, her byline runs across a season of major events: food-focused celebrations like the Tastemaker Awards, fashion-oriented luncheons, hat-themed gatherings at the arboretum, and benefit evenings branded with themes such as “Humans, Horses, Hope.”
Each piece connects a cause to a social scene, balancing beneficiary missions with attention to décor, dress, and the social rituals of North Texas philanthropy.
She also writes lifestyle features that sit adjacent to the society beat, including detailed accounts of milestone weddings, such as a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader’s ceremony in Tuscany. In these pieces, Allmon Merry leans on visual description and narrative pacing more heavily, but the structural discipline remains the same: clear identification of key players, locations, and the story arc of the celebration.
Arts coverage and Tastemaker Awards
Beyond food and society, Allmon Merry contributes to CultureMap’s arts and culture reporting, particularly where leadership changes and public programming intersect. In the Arts section, her stories document appointments like the selection of a new executive director for the Dallas Arts District, focusing on institutional roles, organizational context, and implications for the district’s future rather than personality-driven profiles. Coverage of initiatives such as Aurora Art Quest scavenger hunts frames them as accessible entry points into contemporary art, highlighting how residents can engage with installations and experiences across the city.
Her editorial role places her at the center of CultureMap’s Tastemaker Awards, the brand’s annual celebration of restaurant and bar talent.
The awards site presents the mission as shining a spotlight on the people and places that make Dallas a culinary destination, with nominees introduced through a special editorial series and the event culminating in a live celebration. Her society coverage of the Tastemaker Awards follows the same WHAT/WHERE/THE 411 pattern seen in other gala stories, turning a culinary industry event into a night-by-night account with attention to chefs, restaurants, and the broader food community.
Allmon Merry’s background in features and lifestyle editing underpins this breadth of coverage. Before joining CultureMap, she worked as a features writer and lifestyles editor for a daily newspaper and later edited a major metropolitan Life & Arts section and its luxury magazine, experiences that trained her on home design, gardening, food, fashion, travel, and event coverage in multiple formats. National writing awards from a professional features journalism organization and experience teaching journalism courses underscore her focus on narrative clarity and reader service across beats.
The result is a portfolio where restaurant news, gala coverage, arts stories, and lifestyle features share a common editorial spine: structured storytelling, precise logistical detail, and an emphasis on how people experience places and events.
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.