When Khushbu Shah gave her coffee order one morning last week, she spelled her last name, S-H-A-H for the barista.
“It’s a sign of respect, getting someone’s name right,” said Ms. Shah, 28, who has posted a list on Twitter of the many ways people get her name wrong. “If you can spell Khaleesi, you can spell Khushbu. It’s not that hard.”
When Ms. Shah, who was a senior food editor at Thrillist, starts as the new restaurant editor of Food & Wine magazine at the end of the month, her name will be even more widely known. She hopes to use her new position to diversify the who, and the what, of restaurant coverage.
“I want it to be a real reflection of what the country actually looks like,” she said. “Food is undeniably intersectional. It’s impossible — it’s irresponsible — to deny it.”
She is coming to the magazine, founded in 1978, during a time of transition. Once headquartered in New York, Food & Wine moved its base of operations to Birmingham, Ala., in 2017. When her Brooklyn lease runs out in the spring, Ms. Shah will move to Los Angeles to open a bureau there.
“It’s important that restaurant coverage expand,” Ms. Shah said. “The best way to do that is to get out of New York City.”
Ms. Shah, who is Indian-American, from a Jain family in Michigan, often references her own experiences in her writing. Her heritage has given her “a slightly different baseline than many other people in the industry,” she said. She remembers, as a child, begging her parents to make her sandwiches for lunch instead of Indian food, so she would not be teased at school.
“Flavors like turmeric and cardamom and cumin taste like comfort to me,” she said. “It’s not ‘exotic.’”
Food media — indeed, many media — are showcasing more writers who are not white and male, and who use first-person narratives to tell their stories.
“It’s not just who is covered; it’s who is writing the stories,” said Kat Kinsman, the senior editor at Food & Wine. “It is really important to have bylines and photographers and illustrators on stories that have to do with their identity. Her voice is an incredibly important one.”
The inclusion of personal experience in reported pieces can leave some wondering about the line between journalism and journaling. But, Ms. Kinsman said, “I don’t think you can separate food and identity. It makes everything so much richer.
“I think politics fit into this a whole lot because so much of the political position we’re in in the U.S. is because a point of view of someone raised like me is seen as the default,” said Ms. Kinsman, who is white and was raised in the suburbs. “And that’s not good, and correct, and moral, or any of that.”
Hunter Lewis, the editor in chief, said one of Ms. Shah’s first projects will be working on the magazine’s annual Best New Chefs list. “They are, by and large, the people who have helped shape the food scene in America,” said Mr. Lewis. “Khushbu will have a hand in guiding that franchise.”
To compile and report this list, Ms. Shah will draw on her experience at Thrillist, where she created Prime 13, a list of the country’s best new restaurants. For the 2018 edition, she visited over 80 restaurants in 14 cities in under three months.
“She knows a lot about restaurants in New York, in L.A., in every part of the country you can think of,” said John Sellers, the entertainment director at Thrillist. “She does a great job.”
The Food & Wine editors are also hoping that Ms. Shah, a self-described “digital native,” can help expand the magazine’s online reach. Of 889,492 paid subscriptions for the first six months of 2019, only 37,952 were digital, according to data from the Alliance for Audited Media. Still, a spokesman said, the overall audience is at an all-time high, with wide social media appeal.
In addition to continuing her coverage of diverse cuisines, Ms. Shah hopes to make the Food & Wine list more varied in geography and price points. She said she had learned the importance of empathy in her writing about fast food and inclusive chef clothing. Reporting in Oklahoma about the food writer Ree Drummond (the Pioneer Woman), Ms. Shah wrote that she had encountered “an America very different from my own.”
As an editor, she said, she won’t stand for same-old, same-old coverage.
“I would get this a lot: ‘Oh, well, we wrote an Indian food story last month, so we can’t do one this month,’” she said. “I don’t ever want to hear that again.”
