"When I’m not working in the marketing department, I am a freelance food journalist working around Philadelphia and South Jersey.

I got started by chance, I have always been a big fan of cooking, so I had a little bit of knowledge about what goes into the restaurant industry just based off my own interest and it folded into that.

Month to month I’ll be given a restaurant to review and if it’s something that opened up a couple months ago, we may want to test it out based on what readers ask for or we will also get things sent to us from other publications – things that are gaining popularity.

I think the cool thing about it is they’re mostly family owned, they’re these young people that have a lot of ambition that just come into the community and want to make it better – that’s kind of why I love doing it. There’s these people who give their all into these things and you get to see it come to life – it’s really exciting.

I go with my husband every time, he’s my partner in crime with this. We’ll do two appetizers, two entrees, and a dessert so it’s a lot of food. Sometimes we’ll actually bring another person in depending on what it is. We try to decide dishes based on the history of what we’ve done in the past. We’ll also look at the seasonal availability and it’s a lot of studying what’s coming in and out of season, and studying what we’ve looked at in the past and what are specialty dishes that the chef recommends?

My job is a food critic, when I started I was 22 years old. It’s hard to be on the end of giving people criticism – I’m not a professional chef. So people are relying on me for an opinion. I think that I’m a pretty fair person. I can appreciate when someone pours their heart into something and that there are different circumstances to take into consideration. It’s more about letting people know what’s in their community as opposed to telling them if it’s good or bad.

I definitely think it made me a better chef. One of the things that I did as part of my food writing experience is I got to do some residencies, I got to do some cooking classes in Philadelphia. I can’t say that I can cook like a chef, but they taught me the value of seasoning which is incredibly important. Just putting salt on everything, really seasoning as you go. It made me a more patient chef as well.

When you work with an industry like the food industry and you see these personal touches that people put in their restaurants, they pour their life into it. You can’t help but try and pursue your own passions. When you see this stuff every single night you’re covering it you think, ‘well what am I doing to feel this way?’ I try to do that with my job. I’m so lucky that I get to come to work and walk out and continue to find other things that I’m passionate about. This job really gives me the freedom to do that. I don’t know if I would have really felt that way or really been interested in pursuing my own passions if I didn’t see people do that on a very personal level as a food writer."

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