Editorial team
The people behind the picks
TastyPals guides are written by restaurant critics and food editors who cover specific cities and cuisines in depth — not by algorithms or aggregators.
Marcus Chen
Marcus has spent over a decade eating through Toronto, Vancouver, and the Pacific Northwest — and he's still not tired of it. He covers the full breadth of North American dining but is best known for his deeply reported work on contemporary Canadian cuisine, ramen, and the city's evolving Asian restaurant scene. He believes a great bowl of ramen is one of life's more reliable pleasures, and he will defend that position. Before joining TastyPals he contributed to several print and digital food publications.
Sophie Laurent
Sophie grew up in Montreal and has been covering the city's French-inflected dining scene for most of her career. She has strong opinions about what makes a room feel right — lighting, pacing, the gap between tables — and she is not shy about sharing them. She writes about bistros, wine bars, romantic dining rooms, and the kind of restaurants that make a night feel shaped. Her guides are known for their emphasis on room tone alongside the food, and for occasionally making readers feel guilty about their last date-night choice.
James Whitfield
James covers fine dining, Michelin-recognized restaurants, and the kind of tasting menu experiences worth saving up for. He has followed the Michelin Guide across New York and Chicago for several years and writes about destination restaurants with the same rigour he applies to neighbourhood standbys. His work focuses on value — not just price, but the quality of experience relative to the occasion. He has eaten a lot of very good meals in the name of journalism, and he feels appropriately grateful about this.
Priya Sharma
Priya writes about the restaurants that make a city feel genuinely diverse — South Asian kitchens, vegetarian and plant-forward rooms, brunch spots that justify the line, and group dining destinations that hold together when the table is twelve people deep. She believes brunch is underrated as a meal format and will make that case at length if given the opportunity. She is based in Toronto but covers New York regularly, usually with a very long list of places to try and not quite enough time.
Carlos Mendez
Carlos covers the overlap between food and nightlife — cocktail bars with kitchens worth staying for, late-night spots that deliver after the early crowd thins out, and the casual restaurants that punch well above their price point. He is based in Miami, which he thinks is one of the most underrated food cities in the country, and he will happily spend an afternoon making that argument over Cuban coffee in Little Havana. He writes regularly about the Latin American restaurant scene across the Southern US.