Heidi Billottohas held the position of food editor and restaurant critic for "South Charlotte Weekly" since the newspaper's premier issue in May 2002. In her weekly column Culinary Corner, she features restaurant reviews, as well as food features and occasional recipes. Readers also can turn to her Juicy Tidbits column for food and wine news, cooking contest information, restaurant openings and local and national food and wine related events.

Heidi also writes a Dining Out page for Charlotte Theatre Magazine, a monthly publication featuring news and reviews of Charlotte's many venues of performing arts. The Dining Out page highlights a restaurant of the month as well as an appetizer, drink, dessert and coffee of the month.

Between columns, Heidi teaches an ongoing series of popular cooking classes as part of the continuing education program at Queens University, currently filling classes to capacity. Heidi conducts food and wine classes on Saturday mornings and Sunday afternoons, again to sold-out crowds, at Reid's Fine Foods at Seventh Street Station in uptown Charlotte. In coordination with her classes there, she writes a monthly cooking column as a part of the Reid's on-line newsletter, Only@Reids. The link to her column and information on the cooking classes is on the website www.reids.com. More information about the cooking classes at Queens is available in the continuing education section at www.queens.edu.

For the past several years Heidi has appeared as a quarterly guest and restaurant expert on Charlotte Talks with Jim Beatty, a one-on-one television talk show produced locally by Time Warner and aired on its public access station in Charlotte. Between television appearances, writing and cooking classes, Heidi has taken the time to develop a successful catering business. Her specialty remains elegant in-home or office private dinners and/or cocktail parties.

For the past five years she has conducted a children's critical writing workshop as a part of the summer writing camp held by Stageworks at Providence Day School in Charlotte. In 2000 and again in 2002, she was named as the coordinator of the cooking classes and culinary experiences for the Charlotte Wine and Food Weekend, the largest charity event of its kind in the Southeast, held every other year in Charlotte. Heidi will coordinate the culinary experiences for the weekend in April 2004.

In 2002, Heidi was asked to participate as a judge for the internationally acclaimed James Beard Cookbook Awards. Through her work, Heidi has had the opportunity to meet and interview such food and wine personalities as Graham Kerr and Lynn Rosetta Kasper, winemakers Tim Mondavi, Heidi Barrett, Gus Anderson, Nicolò D'Afflitto and Bob Betz, Chef Paul Bocuse, writer Peter Mayle, wine critic Robert Parker and the incomparable Julia Child.

In her free time, Heidi likes to collect antiques and fine wines and paints pottery. Select pieces of her one of a kind platters and custom-made serving pieces have been offered for sale in the Reid's Fine Foods catalog and several of her larger platters have been sold as a part of the live auction events at the Charlotte Wine and Food Weekends. Prior to her career in the culinary industry, Heidi worked for two years as a kindergarten teacher in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School. A native of Jacksonville, Fla., Heidi is a 1979 graduate of Queens College in Charlotte.