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Dave Infante
James Beard Award winner
- Discipline
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i. Biography
Dave Infante is a James Beard Foundation award winner working in food and drink culture as a reporter’s beat: the rooms, habits, language, and local institutions that form around what people eat and pour. A former writer-at-large at Thrillist, Infante also hosted FOOD/GROUPS, Thrillist’s YouTube series on the relationships between communities and the cuisine by which they define themselves. Food-and-drink reporting, in this register, treats appetite as social evidence. Infante’s work looks at consumption and at the reasons it gathers force: how a drink can mark belonging, how a dish can stand in for identity, and how a crowded room can show the working culture of a city. The beat is convivial and practical, with food and drink understood as public behavior as much as private taste.
The Path
Food-and-drink culture became the field of study after Dave Infante trained at University of Virginia. The work that followed took eating and drinking as social acts, with attention paid not only to what gives pleasure, but to the scenes, rituals, and places that form around it. Digital food media shaped the early public practice: Infante worked as writer at Thrillist from 2014, then as host of food/groups at Thrillist from 2017. Across those roles, the reporting treated the meal, the beer, the restaurant, the counter, and the barstool as ways to read a community’s habits and desires. Writer-at-large work at Thrillist required a voice suited to a broad food-and-drink readership: informed, sharp, and still alert to pleasure. FOOD/GROUPS moved that approach onto video, using cuisine and community as the working frame rather than as separate subjects. Beverage coverage later became the assigned terrain when Infante became beverage-scene reporter for the food section at The Post and Courier. In that role, the glass functioned as an entry point into taste, commerce, ritual, and conversation.
The Work Today
Food and drink culture remains the through-line: what people drink and eat is tied to where they live, how they gather, and what they value. Infante’s own line is plain about the vantage point: “I’m not a coldhearted economist. I’m just a writer who drinks a lot of beer.” The statement is comic, but it also marks method. Beverage reporting here is not only market coverage; it is coverage of preference, pleasure, tension, and the social life that builds around drink.
In Their Words “I host FOOD/GROUPS, Thrillist’s YouTube series that explores the deep, delicious relationships between communities and the cuisine by which they define themselves.” “I’m not a coldhearted economist. I’m just a writer who drinks a lot of beer.”
Acclaim
The James Beard Foundation award recognizes Infante’s work within food journalism, specifically in the territory where food, drink, and culture overlap. The recognition sits on reporting concerned with context: the people, places, and shared meanings that make consumption legible as culture.
Profile updated July 2026
FAQ
Asked of Dave
What is Dave Infante known for?
Food and drink culture.
