Eater has named James Beard Award-winning food and travel journalist Kayla Stewart its new senior editor. Stewart will join Eater.com’s nine-person team in covering restaurant and culture stories; in the role, she’ll work with both staffers and outside contributors to shepherd national coverage of foodways, restaurant trends, and the culture of dining out.
“Kayla’s passion for storytelling is evident in all of her work, as is the reverence she holds for food and its role in the human experience,” says Eater executive editor Erin DeJesus. “I’m so excited for Kayla to bring her curiosities and obsessions to our readers.”
Stewart has contributed to the New York Times, Washington Post, Travel & Leisure, Food & Wine, Afar, and more, writing about everything from New Orleans’s king cake tradition to Afro-Brazilian culinary traditions in Salvador, Brazil. She is the co-author, along with Emily Meggett, of the NYT bestselling cookbook Gullah Geechee Home Cooking, and she won the 2023 James Beard Award for Profile Writing for a story published in Food & Wine. Recently, she served as interim editor for Eater Houston.