Alex Cotrell

Alex Cotrell is a California-based food creator whose restaurant coverage spans the coasts and deep into the American South. With reviews spanning Los Angeles, the Bay Area, Chicago, New Orleans, Baltimore, Detroit, Little Rock, and Charleston, Alex has built one of the most geographically diverse profiles on Social Foodie. He covers the kind of food that defines communities — soul food, BBQ, Cajun cooking, seafood, Jamaican cuisine — and he covers it from LA to Louisiana with equal credibility.

His California picks focus on the communities that make up the real Los Angeles: Compton, Inglewood, Long Beach, South Gate, Windsor Hills, and Lynwood alongside Castro Valley, Oakland, and San Francisco in the Bay Area. He has a clear appreciation for Black-owned restaurants and for the Southern cooking traditions that took root in California when families migrated from the South during the Great Migration.

What Alex understands is that the best food in America often exists outside the restaurant districts that get written about in magazines. His picks reflect a commitment to finding great cooking wherever it lives — in strip malls, in neighborhoods, in cities that don't get enough credit. His Social Foodie profile is a map of those places, built over years of dedicated eating.