Samin Nosrat Quotes

Samin Nosrat

Profession : Chef

Birth : November 7, 1979

I'm not the number-one fan of the heavy holiday meal. And also, I didn't grow up eating them, the traditional Western holiday meals, so it's just not something I have a nostalgic relationship to.

Samin Nosrat

I'm surprisingly squeamish.

Samin Nosrat

For me, I am very much a champion of home cooking and home cooks.

Samin Nosrat

There are so many food shows, really beautiful ones, that exist to elevate professional cooking and professional chefs. But there aren't that many that really celebrate home cooking or are for home cooks especially.

Samin Nosrat

Does anybody like being recognized? I understand that it's my job. I'm grateful about people who are moved enough by the work to want to say something. But I mourn the loss of anonymity.

Samin Nosrat

There's nothing historically in my life very flashy. I'm not exceptionally beautiful. I'm not exceptionally wealthy.

Samin Nosrat

I can only be me!

Samin Nosrat

I'm the child of immigrants, and there was always a garage filled with food, just in case, and you kept money under the mattress. You were always prepared, because you couldn't trust that you were being taken care of. So that translated into my life into a lot of opportunity hoarding.

Samin Nosrat

I would say, probably 7 or 8 years into my cooking career, it stopped being about just food for me. Food's really fun, but I've always been about people, and I realized that food is just a really convenient tool for me to connect people and bring them together.

Samin Nosrat

I think the goal of 'Chef's Table' is that you are so moved by the story that you want to go and eat that person's food at their restaurant. But I wanted the takeaway from my show to be that you go and cook the thing.

Samin Nosrat

What any immigrant is after is a taste of home.

Samin Nosrat

Chez Panisse is a sensory temple - you might have to be made of stone not to fall for it.

Samin Nosrat

The people-pleasing and performing is 100% ingrained in me, partly because I was a little brown girl growing up in a very white, homogeneous community in San Diego - where, in second grade, I was called a terrorist.

Samin Nosrat

People love giving cooks spoons, I've noticed. Or, at least, they love giving them to me.

Samin Nosrat

I went straight from college into restaurants, so, from the beginning, my idea of what a kitchen should be was the highfalutin' restaurant type - and what I had at home never measured up to that.

Samin Nosrat

When I left restaurants, I had to learn to be a home cook.

Samin Nosrat

I have a lot of plants - my living room is like a jungle. I like the idea of bringing the outside in.

Samin Nosrat

We all have incredible relationships to what we eat, to what we don't eat, to what we've eaten since childhood and what we were fed, to what food means to us. And so I find it a really powerful tool in storytelling and in opening people's hearts and their minds.

Samin Nosrat