Valeria Bartra
Valeria Bartra is TCPalm's food reporter, covering restaurants and food businesses on Florida's Treasure Coast. She focuses on how new and existing dining spots in Port St. Lucie, Vero Beach, Stuart and Fort Pierce open, evolve and sometimes close. Across her work she blends service guides, business reporting, health inspection coverage and community stories to give a full picture of the local food scene.
Restaurant openings, closings and concept shifts
Bartra closely follows the arrival of new restaurants, tracking what is coming soon to Port St. Lucie, Vero Beach, Stuart and Fort Pierce and explaining the concepts behind each venue. Her coverage notes the styles of food on offer and situates each opening within the broader dining landscape of the Treasure Coast. In her reporting on RockHouse Live in Jensen Beach, she details how the business touts celebrity-branded liquor, daily concerts and signed guitars, showing an interest in the entertainment and branding strategies that shape a restaurant’s identity. When writing about The Tides, a seafood restaurant in Vero Beach, she focuses on relocation plans and how the move will affect regulars, emphasizing continuity and customer loyalty as much as logistics. She documents closures with the same care, as in her piece on Think Greek’s restaurant locations and dessert truck shutting down in Port St. Lucie and Stuart, giving readers clarity on when and why a familiar option is leaving the market.
Restaurant inspections and food safety
Health inspections are a recurring part of Bartra’s beat, and she presents them in direct, accessible summaries that highlight both strong performers and problem areas. In St. Lucie County she reports on restaurants and food trucks that receive perfect scores alongside several that fail inspection, listing establishments and outcomes so readers can see how each kitchen measures up. She applies the same format in Martin County, noting which restaurants earn top marks and which fall short, again tying specific inspection results to named businesses. By putting inspection data into regular stories, she adds an accountability thread to her food coverage, connecting the everyday decision of where to eat with official oversight of cleanliness and safety.
Service guides to local dining
Service-driven guides are a defining feature of her work, often structured as themed lists that help readers decide where to go and what to order. In a roundup of ten Florida restaurants with standout hot dogs on the Treasure Coast, she collects options across the region and highlights what makes each spot worth visiting. Her summer dining guide steers locals and visitors toward restaurants in Port St. Lucie, Vero Beach, Stuart and Fort Pierce that are less crowded with tourists, combining notes on location, atmosphere and cuisine to make the advice practical. She extends this list-based approach to future openings, using new-restaurant roundups to tell readers which places are about to debut and what kind of food and experience they can expect.
Community stories and multimedia coverage
Bartra’s reporting often foregrounds the people behind local food businesses, not just the menus. In one story she writes about a restaurant couple who died two days apart after serving soul food inspired by Zora Neale Hurston, framing the piece around their lives, their cooking and their place in the community. She engages directly with local audiences, introducing herself in community forums as TCPalm’s new food and restaurant reporter and seeking information on “ghost kitchens,” which shows her interest in emerging, delivery-first models alongside traditional dining rooms. Her byline extends into short-form video and photography for TCPalm’s social channels, where her credited images and clips feature barbecue restaurants, pizzerias, cafes and donut shops, adding visual context to the written coverage. Her work also appears on other digital outlets in stories about an oyster bar opening and a gourmet grocery planning kitchen renovations, keeping the focus on how food businesses launch, upgrade and adapt to operational challenges.
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.