The Year in Food Writing

While the industry of food media itself may be struggling, that doesn’t negate the brilliant work that so many writers managed to publish in 2025. We’ve been in awe of our colleagues across the space who continue to do excellent work, ask the tough questions, probe the food world, and inspire us through it all. Here, we’ve assembled a very arbitrary, very subjective list of some of our favorite reads from the year. We’d love to hear what your favorites were too — please share them with us!

Best account of a chef being a whiny baby

MacKenzie Fegan, restaurant critic at The San Francisco Chronicle, wrote about her absolutely bizzaro, incredibly extraordinary night eating at the French Laundry, where she was pulled aside by Thomas Keller and asked to leave (but then deciding to cook for her anyway after a heart-to-heart). “It’s not like I thought Keller was going to fill my pockets with pie weights and drop me in the Napa River... But at a restaurant of this ilk, you pay for the privilege of submitting yourself wholly to Chef’s genius and his staff’s omniscient hospitality. You give yourself over to culinary surprise and delight. But what if that chef has decided you’re the enemy?”

Best look at the role of food and small business in local elections

For Vittles, Apoorva Tadepalli wrote about the role local restaurants played in NYC major-elect Zohran Mamdani’s campaign. “...food establishments are crucial to big-city life for so many reasons,” writes Tadepalli. “They serve as either a break from, or a bolster for routine, forcing us to interact with other people at a time when avoiding human contact has become normalised… As streets in global capitals are homogenised by billionaire-owned chains and private equity, Mamdani highlights that small-food businesses add an unquantifiable joy to the experience of living in a dense, fast-paced city.” 

Best explanation of how it became embarrassing to be a “foodie”

Writer and friend of the blog Jaya Saxena wrote about The Life and Death of the American Foodie for Eater — how the word evolved from a ubiquitous, throwaway phrase to signify taste to a pejorative. It’s a historical survey, from Julia Child and Top Chef to the food influencer era, and a good hard look at how we got here. “On the internet, we live and die by our superlatives,” writes Saxena. “That has created a significant shift in food culture, the need for everything to be a promise of a superior experience.”  

Best behind-the-scenes look at baking competition shows

For The New Yorker, Ruby Tandoh wrote about what it was really like inside the tent at The Great British Bakeoff. “It is hard to think of another show that screens so carefully not just for personality type and talent but also for that more slippery variable, purity of intention,” she writes. “Producers find themselves in the position of trying to cast one of the best-known shows on television — one that routinely makes people famous — with people who care about neither television nor fame. They have to sniff out clout-chasers, and pick through government databases for things like criminal convictions and undeclared baking businesses.”  

Best critique of mainstream food media

For her newsletter, Alicia Kennedy wrote about the shortcomings of a media form that positions itself as journalism or criticism, but fails at almost every turn. “Food is feminized in the home, made masculine in the workplace, but in both cases, it is not broadly thought to be pursued for intellectual reasons. The visceral nature of eating means that it can never be serious in the common imagination, and this might be key to mainstream food media’s anti-intellectualism: too necessary, too everyday. The writing, thus, isn’t finding its foundation in behavioral studies, the labor conditions of the global agriculture’s 1.3 billion workers, or climate change reporting: It’s just vibes and appetites, like a baby.”

Best pan of a restaurant

There’s been a lot of hand-wringing about the state and purpose of restaurant criticism (we got into that too). But Helen Rosner’s New Yorker critique of La Boca, chef Francis Mallmann’s NYC debut, feels like especially evocative, fresh, and honest food writing. “Being there feels placeless, cocoonlike, as if you’ve slipped through some fold in the city into a realm where time moves differently, where you’re not quite in New York, and not quite in Buenos Aires, and certainly nowhere near a wild, smoke-kissed island in remote Patagonia, but in a swaddled nowhere, watching a sequin-gowned singer croon “Bésame Mucho” over a piano and a double bass.”

Best analysis of the shutdown shitshow

For Grist, Ayurella Horn-Muller took a hard look at “How the shutdown broke America’s food chain — and what happens next.” “...the shutdown has left behind fractures on the nation’s food system that are only beginning to appear. These cracks will only widen with time as they join with all of the other major food and farming policy changes enacted by the Trump administration — which altogether are affecting who eats what, where that food comes from, and which communities get left behind.”  

Best ode to gas station food

For TASTE, Yolanda Evans wrote about how gas station food — from register boiled peanuts to full-service restaurants — are emblems of Southern Black resilience. “‘We have a culture around eating, and it doesn’t matter if you have to drive 20 minutes… I think that there’s just a really special relationship where we want to make sure that we can have proximity to good food at all times. The gas station restaurant serves as a source for feeding the community.’”   

Best account of baking through war and grief

Nisreen Shehada, a Palestinian baker and dentist, was displaced from her home in Gaza City in October, 2023. Amidst the genocide, she turned to baking sourdough again. Writer Jun Chou interviewed Shehada for Cake Zine. “In times of tumult, routine persists. So, Nisreen did what was familiar: she crocheted, she documented, she uploaded, she baked. Only this time, baking was a lifeline. ‘We had to make bread just to survive,’ she says. ‘Sometimes bread would be the only thing people would eat all day.’”

Best critique of Best-of lists

The irony is not lost on us for slapping this onto our very own “Best of” list. But Ben Ryder Howe’s critique of the shortcomings of franchises like World’s 50 Best and the many best-of hospitality and restaurant lists for New York Magazine felt like a long time coming. “When I ask a dozen publicists in luxury travel to explain to me how they understand the workings of the various lists, several show me multipage spreadsheets devoted to tracking and decoding them, which they show to clients demanding placement… ‘Do me a favor,’ says another. ‘Find out and let me know.’ Stymied in their efforts to crack the code, publicists have attempted to figure out who the judges are so they can influence them with free trips.”