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| Owner | Vox Media Independent |
|---|---|
| URL | eater.com |
| Launched | July 2005; 19 years ago (2005-07)[1] |
Eater is a food website byVox Media. It was co-founded byLockhart Steele and Ben Leventhal in 2005, and originally focused on dining and nightlife inNew York City. Eater launched a national site in 2009, and covered nearly 20 cities by 2012. Vox Media acquiredEater, along with two others comprising the Curbed Network, in late 2013. In 2025, Eater operates sites in 23 American cities, as well as its national site. The site has been recognized twelve times by theJames Beard Foundation Awards.
The food and dining siteEater is a brand of thedigital media companyVox Media.[2][3] It serves as a local restaurant guide, offering reviews as well as news about the restaurant industry.[4][5] The property earns revenue via advertising, sometimes displaying content generated by Vox Creative.[6]
Eater was co-founded byLockhart Steele and Ben Leventhal in July 2005,[3][7] and initially focused on New York City's dining and nightlife scenes.[8] The blog was one of three comprising the Curbed Network, founded by Steele in 2004,[9] along with thereal estate and fashion networks calledCurbed andRacked, respectively. By 2007,Eater was receiving tens of thousands of readers per day.[1] After expanding into Los Angeles and San Francisco,[1][10] the network went national in 2009,[8] and covered approximately 20 cities and one U.S. state (Maine) by mid 2012.[11][12]
Vox Media purchased the Curbed Network for approximatelyUS$30 million in November 2013.[2][13][14] Traffic toEater increased by 250 percent following the acquisition.[15] In early 2014,Business Insider reported that Eater was generating approximately 2 million of Vox Media's 45 million unique monthly visitors, according to the analytics companycomScore.[5] The site began using Vox Media'scontent management system, Chorus, and producing more video content.[3][15] Steele said he soldEater partly to observe Chorus' influence on the site. The platform allowsEater to enhance map, journalistic, and visual features, and improves user engagement viaforums.[15]
In mid 2017,Eater launched a London site, the network's first outside North America.Eater hosted 23 sites for cities in the United States and Canada at the time.[16] It has since closed its London and Montreal sites.
In 2021, Vox Media acquired drinks websitePunch as a brand withinEater.[17]
Eater may be best known for its maps, which serve as guides to readers on where to eat in specific cities. In 2022,Eater launched theirEater 38 maps, which share 38 essential restaurants in eachEater cities. OtherEater maps includeEater heatmaps which spotlight the newest restaurants in cities; as well as maps focused on certain cuisines or certain neighborhoods. The majority ofEater maps showcase restaurants across the 23 US cities for which it has dedicated sites, but there are also maps identifying the best restaurants in popular national and international destinations including St. Louis, Honolulu, Kansas City, Barcelona, Rome, Paris, Tokyo, and Florence.
In addition to written content,Eater has a team devoted to video. The site produced a web series calledSavvy, which featured chefs,restaurateurs, andsommeliers discussingdishes andcooking techniques. The program's second season aired in 2015. In 2017, Vox Media greenlit the seriesCult Following andYou Can Do This forEater.Eater’s video program is currently focused on mid-form docu-style video, with series such asMise en Place, The Experts,Smoke Point, andVendors. The program has earned five New York Emmy awards, including two forVendors (one in 2022, another in 2021), and four Daytime Emmy nominations.
Eater andPBS collaborated on a six-episode documentary television show about the cuisine of immigrant neighborhoods throughout the U.S., hosted by chef and restaurateurMarcus Samuelsson. The show,No Passport Required, markedEater's first television production project. Vox Entertainment produced the show, which premiered in July 2018. Vox Media executivesJim Bankoff andMarty Moe serve as two of severalexecutive producers.
In January 2018,Eater andSB Nation aired an online three-episode celebrity cooking competition series sponsored byPepsiCo. The show featuredNational Football League playersGreg Jennings,Rashad Jennings, andNick Mangold as competitors, as well as chefsAnne Burrell andJosh Capon.
In 2020,Eater debuted its first TV series in partnership with Hulu,Eater’s Guide to the World. The seven-episode show was hosted by Maya Rudolph and explored unique dining experiences across the world, with episodes spotlighting Los Angeles, Costa Rica, Casablanca, and more.
Eater has a robust digital footprint and presence across the most influential social platforms, including Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and Facebook, reaching over 30 million people a month across digital platforms.
In 2022,Eater announced its first book deal in partnership with Abrams publishing. In 2023,Eater released its first cookbook featuring restaurant recipes, edited by formerEater restaurant editor Hillary Dixler Canavan. In 2024, travel guides to New York City and Los Angeles.
In 2024, Eater launched the Eater app for iOS, featuring all of the maps from all 23 of the website’s cities and Eater.com—in total 10,000 maps from over 100 cities worldwide.
Eater was initially led by co-founders Leventhal and Steele, who also served as president of the Curbed Network,[8] ranked number 34 inThe Daily Meal's 2011 list of "America's 50 Most Powerful People in Food", for his role as a founder ofEater.[4]
In 2014, Amanda Kludt was namedEater's firsteditor-in-chief,[3][18] andRobert Sietsema was hired to be a New York-based food writer.[5][15]
In March 2022, Stephanie Wu becameEater’s second-ever editor-in-chief, succeeding Amanda Kludt. In 2024, Jill Dehnert, Eater's former GM, was named the group publisher of the lifestyle publications at Vox Media, comprisingEater, PS, Punch, andThrillist.
Food & Wine has calledEater "required reading".[1] In 2006, the magazine included Steele and Leventhal in their "Tastemaker Awards" list, recognizing fifteen people who had significant impact on the food and wine industries by age 35, for their "ingenious" posts.[10]
The network's content has been recognized twelve times by theJames Beard Foundation Awards, established to honor excellence in cuisine,food writing, andculinary education in the United States.[19][20]Eater has also won six awards from American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME) and five Emmys. On the local level, various Eater cities have been recognized by local chapters of the Society of Professional Journalists including the SPJ Northwest, SPJ Chicago, and SPJ DC as well as the New York Press Club and Los Angeles Press Club.
Eater has also popped up in popular culture, cited in TV shows such asThe Bear andThe Morning Show.
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