Susana Guerrero
Susana Guerrero follows the fortunes of restaurants and food businesses in California, focusing on how openings, closures and industry shifts shape everyday dining and neighborhood life. She is a senior news reporter at SFGATE and has covered Bay Area restaurant and food news since 2015. Her work ranges from daily industry news to deeper features on legacy brands and the systems behind familiar foods, and a profile she wrote on celebrity chef Martin Yan earned second place in the San Francisco Press Club awards in 2022.
Bay Area restaurant openings and closures
Guerrero tracks the lifecycle of Bay Area restaurants, from debut to shuttering, with close attention to how long-running businesses exit the scene. She has reported on the shutdown of San Francisco’s trendsetting sushi burrito chain Sushirrito, documenting the end of a 15-year run for a brand that helped popularize the mashup of sushi and burritos. She has covered the closure of Castroville’s Giant Artichoke Restaurant after more than six decades, explaining how a fixture devoted to Monterey County’s signature crop is giving way to new development.
Her work on a Bay Area teppanyaki restaurant known as Nijo Castle, closing and slated for demolition after nearly 40 years, highlights the emotional weight of these decisions for families and longtime patrons. On the other side of the cycle, she writes about new arrivals such as the popular Marugame Udon chain opening in Berkeley, detailing promotions and what the addition means for local diners.
Across these pieces, she treats restaurant openings and closures as stories about continuity, change and the local businesses that define dining culture.
Food businesses, brands and supply chains
Beyond individual restaurants, Guerrero profiles the food companies and supply chains that underpin what people eat. She has written about a decades-old Napa winery, Signorello Estate, filing for bankruptcy and facing tens of millions of dollars in debt, turning a business filing into a story about a historic producer and its financial pressures. Her coverage of a lawsuit over California grocery store sushi examines the “dark side” of prepared seafood sold in supermarkets, bringing legal scrutiny and food safety concerns into the frame of everyday shopping.
She has explored the Bay Area condiment maker Wing Nien Foods, tracing how a soy sauce operation that began in a Chinatown basement now runs a plant producing hundreds of thousands of gallons of soy sauce annually and supplies ubiquitous takeout packets. In a feature on Guittard Chocolate, she highlights the company’s long history as a family-owned chocolate producer and its role supplying iconic names like See’s Candies and restaurants such as Chez Panisse. Through The Sunday Read, she has unpacked the century-plus story of Martinelli’s sparkling apple cider, connecting a viral trend involving its glass bottles to the brand’s 153-year California roots.
These pieces show her interest in how heritage, manufacturing and distribution shape the food brands that appear on menus and in grocery aisles.
Food, infrastructure and local impacts
Guerrero often situates food stories within broader questions of infrastructure and civic decisions. Her reporting on St. Helena’s brown, foul-smelling tap water covers how a tourism-focused Napa County city is grappling with a prolonged water crisis that affects hotels, restaurants and residents, including business owners who describe the situation as an embarrassment. In this work, she connects utility problems to the practical realities of running kitchens and maintaining hospitality standards.
Earlier coverage of Berkeley’s pedestrian bridge over Interstate 80, and a vote to remove its “Berkeley Big People” statues, shows a willingness to follow public art and civic commissions when they intersect with the spaces where people move through the city. Even in roundups of positive news during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, she has contributed stories that foreground local resilience and the role of food and community institutions amid disruption.
Her beat consistently ties food to the physical and regulatory environment that either supports or strains it.
Narrative features and newsletters
Alongside hard news, Guerrero writes narrative and first-person features that explore personal relationships to food and place. In essays such as her reflection on Safeway’s cereal aisle as an entry point into American food culture, she uses her own experience to illuminate how supermarket products can shape identity and nostalgia.
Through The Sunday Read, she has introduced readers to hidden or lesser-known Bay Area stories, including the full backstory behind the “Secret Sidewalk” and the deeper history behind familiar beverages like Martinelli’s sparkling cider. These pieces blend reporting with storytelling, emphasizing sensory detail and history. She also invites tips on Bay Area restaurants, bars and bakeries, signaling an ongoing interest in uncovering new venues and under-the-radar food stories. Taken together, her body of work reflects a reporter who covers food not only as industry news, but as culture, memory and infrastructure, with a consistent focus on how specific businesses and brands shape everyday life.
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.