Dining Devon is a not-for-profit food blog that writes about restaurants, cafes and other food and drink opportunities throughout the Devon area reporting on dining events; pop-up restaurants; locally produced food and drinks; product reviews; hotel stays and coverage of food festivals too. 

Formerly called Eating Exeter, Dining Devon was rebranded in August 2017 with a new look and a name that more accurately reflected the geographical scope of the blog.

If you have a delicious foodie event to promote in Devon or within the wider South West, please make contact through the contact page.

We write the blog for the love of food and drink, and everything that makes this part of the world the foodie hub that it is.  We all have a lot of fun writing the blog and promoting the great places we discover.

Founder, Burger and Cheese addict: Chris Gower

Chris has been blogging and writing about food for 11 years and successfully eating it for as long as he can remember.  He particularly likes cheese, cheesecake and anything that resembles a burger with cheese. He founded this blog with his foodie friend Polly after realising that TripAdvisor was/is crap.

With a passion for Devon food and all of the wonderful places within it that make Devon a bastion for great UK food and dining Chris has written for local and national publications occasionally, in between his full time job as a professional academic librarian and digital technologist.

Despite being good at eating food, he is still working on creating it, which involves much mess in the kitchen and exclamations of “how did you manage to get it up there?”.

There was a time when he was a vegetarian.  But this didn’t work out very well.

Chris enjoys many things in life including films, keeping guinea pigs and pretending to know about wine. Follow on Twitter and Instagram.

Editor, Social Media Wrangler & Devon Wine Whisperer: Lauren Heath

Lauren, originally South African born, immigrated to the UK in Christmas ’96 and started working her way up for 7 years in the hospitality industry, where she met her chef husband.

With 18 years of business and administrative experience, she is an Admin Guru by day at an Edtech company, so is well organised, a master of social media and generally being social – she is well known in networking circles, and great at connecting people. 

In 2018, she was selected as one of Exeter’s 100 Most Influential Women by Grow Exeter Magazine. 

Lauren has been part of Dining Devon since February 2016. Outside of work, she is a self-proclaimed foodie with food and drink adventures a firm subject on the weekend itinerary with her chef husband, and their 11 year old son – they even have an in-car fridge for impromptu purchases! She loves a good strong artisan coffee and is also on a Devon Wine Mission. She also enjoys the beach in all seasons (she’s bonkers and sea dips all year round) and indulges in amateur photography using her Samsung smartphone, which she uses for all her food photography. She has now lived in Devon for 9 years and loves it.

Lauren is also up for a bit of freelance writing and currently writes for The Exeter Magazine and South West 660 has written restaurant reviews for Exeter Living Magazine and Crumbs Magazine Devon. She is also a hospitality judge for two South West based awards bodies.

Follow Lauren on LinkedIn, Instagram and Twitter or visit her online portfolio here www.laurenheath.me

Chief Fire Wrangler & Baker: Sue Stoneman

Sue is the South West Home Cook of the Year 2017 and has successfully held on to her title from 2016.  An enthusiastic home cook from Exmouth, Sue loves to cook for her family (husband and two grown-up boys) and friends.

Her cooking is not confined to her kitchen, she also cooks outdoors on her barbecues and in a wood-fired oven that she built herself.  She has a few other cooking titles under her hat including Sticky Toffee Pudding Champion, West Country Baking Champion and has appeared on TV with chef James Martin.

You can find Sue working at Bigfire, occasionally firing up and rustling up tasty treats for visitors, demoing at local Food & Drink Festivals and for Taste of Game.  She also is a contributor for the online UK BBQ Magazine, writer for Taste Buds Magazine and has previously written restaurant reviews for Crumbs Magazine Devon & The Attraction Press.

She enjoys everything about Devon, walking, cycling, the beach and especially when it comes to food and drink the exploring, cooking, eating and drinking of it!

You can follow Sue on Twitter and Instagram

Guest Contributors

Formidable Front of House– Beattie Phillips

Beattie has worked in the hospitality industry for over 20 years. Her CV includes cooking on superyachts, running her own mobile catering business and working both front and back of house in pubs, restaurants and even a castle.  She currently lives in Devon with her husband, daughter and two lurchers.  Food heaven… eating seafood where you can see and smell the sea. 

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Invites, Visits and Gifted Items

Disclaimer – As with many blogs with a good social reach, occasionally a restaurant or PR company will contact us with an invitation for a review meal or an invite to a launch event, or a company may send us some products to try.  This is not always a guarantee of a Dining Devon recommendation and it is not always a guarantee of a glowing review but often the invitations are from restaurants who are already doing great things.

Review meals are a journalistic norm, some bloggers accept them and some don’t. If Dining Devon is invited to a restaurant, generally there will be a line in the review that will say ‘we were invited along to…‘ which is as obvious as we can make it. This means that we were invited to a meal, paid for by the PR company or restaurant for review purposes. 

We will put something at the end of the blog to say whether something was hosted, paid for or sponsored which in all cases is classes as an #ad as per the rules by ASA.  When we post on social media, we’ll do our best to indicate if something we are posting is #invited, #PRevent, #hosted or #sponsored.

The ASA guidelines for all social media influencers can be found here – we stick to this in writing our content and believe in being as transparent as we can be.

If you’d like to engage with us for a review, event or PR news, please visit our Contact & PR page.