Maile Carpenter, food editor at Time Out New York, is often told that she has the best job in the city.  She agrees every day except Thursdays, when she closes the magazine’s Eat Out section—a weekly production that includes news and trend stories on the New York restaurant scene, openings, event listings and 100 reviews. When she isn’t eating excessively, she’s editing excessively—managing freelancers and editing both the magazine section and TONY’s Eating & Drinking Guide, an annual book of more than 2,000 reviews. Carpenter graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s School of Journalism in 1995 and started her career as a newspaper columnist and feature writer in Wilmington, North Carolina, quickly moving to the film-and-TV-writer spot at the Raleigh News & Observer.  In 1997, she was recruited to Time Inc. in New York, where she wrote and edited the company’s sarcastic in-house newsletter, FYI. While writing for several Time Inc. magazines, she trained at night for her dream job—food writing—at the French Culinary Institute in Soho. Culinary degree in hand, she moved to San Francisco in 2000 and was hired as a senior editor at San Francisco Magazine, charged with revamping the trendy front-of-the-book section, editing cover packages and writing food features. Missing New York, she left the Bay Area in 2002 to assume her current position at Time Out. Carpenter won a James Beard Award in magazine feature writing in 2002. Her freelance work has appeared in Travel & Leisure, Self, Real Simple, Sports Illustrated, Teen People, Coastal Living and Health.

(2004)