Michele Leocadio

Michele Leocadio creates restaurant content for Elev8ed Table, where she is the lead editorial contributor. Seven years of covering Orange County — Irvine, Newport Beach, Costa Mesa — is what sits behind the credentials listed above: a long habit of showing up, ordering widely, and writing down what was actually on the plate.

How she comes to know a restaurant varies, and the page always tells you which it was. Some she has eaten at herself, and those carry her own photographs and her own notes. Some she has confirmed by picking up the phone, because a catering minimum or a plated-service detail is usually something only an owner or an events manager can answer. Most of the county guides are neither: they are built from what each business publishes about itself — its own menus, catering pages, pricing and terms — read at the source, cross-checked against its listings, and dated when the business last updated the page.

That last group is the largest, and it gets the most discipline rather than the least. A figure that cannot be traced to a business’s own material does not go on the page, and one that comes from a page the business has not touched in three years goes on with the year attached. It is a narrower promise than a review, and a more useful one when you are booking for three hundred people: what a caterer will serve, what it costs per head, and how much notice it needs.

Her name on a guide means it was researched under those rules and that she stands behind them. Elev8ed Table decides who is featured and how they rank on merit alone. We never sell placement or ranking.