Thao Nguyen and Samin Nosrat

City Arts & Lectures

Songwriter, performer, and multi-instrumentalist Thao Nguyen is celebrated for her richly percussive music and her fiercely delivered vocals. She has released five albums with the band Thao & The Get Down Stay Down including the most recent, Temple, a powerful exploration of Nguyen’s identity as a queer person and the daughter of Vietnamese refugees. Her collaborations with Joanna Newsom, Andrew Bird and many others have earned her an esteemed place in the indie rock world. In 2019, Nguyen assumed the role of host for the popular podcast Song Exploder.
Samin Nosrat is a cook, teacher, and author of the James Beard Award-winning cookbook Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. She is an Eat columnist at The New York Times Magazine and the host and executive producer of the Netflix original documentary series based on her book. Nosrat learned to cook at Chez Panisse, alongside Benedetta Vitali and Dario Cecchini in Italy, and at the former restaurant Eccolo in Berkeley. As an undergrad at UC Berkeley, Nosrat studied poetry with Bob Hass, Shakespeare with Stephen Booth, and journalism with Michael Pollan. She currently hosts a popular podcast Home Cooking, alongside musician Hrishikesh Hirway.
On January 20, 2023, Samin Nosrat and Thao Nguyen had an onstage conversation at the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco about their work, their experiences as children of immigrants, and dealing with unexpected fame. Thao Nguyen also performed two songs.