Eater (website)

Eater is a food website by Vox Media. It was co-founded by Lockhart Steele and Ben Leventhal in 2005, and originally focused on dining and nightlife in New York City. Eater launched a national site in 2009, and covered nearly 20 cities by 2012. Vox Media acquired Eater, 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 the James Beard Foundation Awards.

The food and dining site Eater is a brand of the digital media company Vox Media. It serves as a local restaurant guide, offering reviews as well as news about the restaurant industry. The property earns revenue via advertising, sometimes displaying content generated by Vox Creative.

Eater was co-founded by Lockhart Steele and Ben Leventhal in July 2005, and initially focused on New York City's dining and nightlife scenes. The blog was one of three comprising the Curbed Network, founded by Steele in 2004, along with the real estate and fashion networks called Curbed and Racked, respectively. By 2007, Eater was receiving tens of thousands of readers per day. After expanding into Los Angeles and San Francisco, the network went national in 2009, and covered approximately 20 cities and one U.S. state (Maine) by mid 2012.

Vox Media purchased the Curbed Network for approximately US$30 million in November 2013. Traffic to Eater increased by 250 percent following the acquisition. 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 company comScore. The site began using Vox Media's content management system, Chorus, and producing more video content. Steele said he sold Eater partly to observe Chorus' influence on the site. The platform allows Eater to enhance map, journalistic, and visual features, and improves user engagement via forums.

Eater Maine was shutdown at the beginning of 2016. 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. It has since closed its London and Montreal sites.

In 2021, Vox Media acquired drinks website Punch as a brand within Eater.

In 2025, Eater laid off 15 employees.

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 their Eater 38 maps, which share 38 essential restaurants in each Eater cities. Other Eater maps include Eater heatmaps which spotlight the newest restaurants in cities; as well as maps focused on certain cuisines or certain neighborhoods. The majority of Eater 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.