Streetwise Gourmet

The project

Streetwise Gourmet is a food and drink publication built around a simple premise: honest writing about food from two people who genuinely care about it. Co-authored with Matt Lallo — a career restaurant industry executive who spent years as CFO for competitive restaurant groups in the Philadelphia region — the site covers Baltimore-area restaurant reviews, recipe development, wine, and the broader culinary culture we find ourselves thinking about.

My background is in design and a decade-plus of studio pottery before moving into product design. Matt brings the industry depth. Together the editorial voice sits somewhere between considered food writing and the kind of thing you'd say to a friend asking where to eat.

Design and platform

The site runs on Ghost, which handles publishing, subscriptions, and the newsletter cleanly without requiring a custom CMS build. The design is minimal by intention — food photography carries the pages, so the layout stays out of the way. Category-based organization (Cooking, Recipes, Travel, Wine, Kitchen Tools, Business) keeps the archive navigable as the content library grows.

AI-assisted illustration fills gaps where photography isn't available or doesn't fit the tone of a piece — a practical solution for a publication without a photography budget.

Content

The publication covers a wide range: Baltimore restaurant reviews written with enough specificity to be genuinely useful, heritage recipes grounded in technique rather than trend, wine and food pairing notes, travel eating, and the occasional piece on kitchen tools or the restaurant business itself. The Baltimore regional focus is intentional — there's no shortage of national food media, but honest local coverage is harder to find.

Readers subscribe free, with access to the full archive and a bi-monthly newsletter that surfaces recent pieces.