Samin Nosrat Shares Her Guide to Hosting a Group Dinner
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Samin Nosrat is joy personified. The happiness that the chef, made famous by her cookbook-turned-hit Netflix show Salt Fat Acid Heat, derives from food is evident. Her eyes widen when a new flavor tickles her tongue, her shoulders shimmy, a wide smile stretches across her face, often followed by a belly laugh. The glee she experiences is perhaps exceeded only by the even greater pleasure she feels when sharing her recipes with others.
Nosrat has long been gathering people together for meals. From small apartments and dishes shared at her coffee table to cooking in friend’s kitchens and around fire pits in the backyard, she has learned over the years that, as much as she loves the food, the company around the table is the star. “Three weeks ago, we had hot dogs outside. There are times that everyone is tired, so we just order empanadas. It’s not about out cooking one another or posting it on the internet—it’s about thinking about the times when you felt the best,” she says. “Often, you don’t remember the fancy wine or the food. What sticks is, ‘Oh, we all felt so comfortable and cozy and we were laughing so hard.’ How do you create that for your people?”
Salt Fat Acid Heat by Samin Nosrat
Growing up in an Iranian-American family in San Diego, where she was teased at school for bringing Persian food as her lunch, Nosrat struggled to find her people. “I have spent my whole life, both in my childhood and beyond, really struggling to find a place to fit in,” she tells me over Zoom from her home in Oakland. “I’ve always felt outside, even in my own family. I never had that circle of friends. Even in cooking, it’s a tightly knit community, and I had to work really hard to be invited in.” She felt like she was always the one saying, “Hey, what are you guys doing in there? Can I come?”
As she got older, she realized that hosting her own gatherings was a way to ensure she’d be included. “This is so sad to say, but if I’m the one throwing the party, then I’m invited by default,” she says. “If I’m the one cooking, then I get to be part of the thing. I don’t have to wait for—or hope for—an invitation.”
Nosrat began cooking at age 19, starting her career while she was still a college English major at Alice Waters’s famed Chez Panisse. In those early days, her gatherings centered on the food—she was curious and excited and wanted to “eat all the best foods in the world,” she says. Her focus was on what was on the table, not who was sitting at it.
Over time, that began to reverse, in part, she says, through therapy that helped her realize shared meals didn’t need to be about winning people over—that they could be used to nourish herself, as well as others. “What matters is creating an excuse to come together to say, ‘How are you? What’s happening? Tell me about your life. Do you feel included here? How do we make a safe, comfortable place?’” Nosrat explains. “Rather than trying to get into someone else’s circle, I realized the most fulfilling thing was to create that for myself.”
About four years ago, Nosrat’s love for group dinners went from casual to ritualized. One day, when she was feeling sad while cooking, some friends stopped by and said: “Why don’t you bring that over, and we’ll eat it together?” She did, and the experience was so nice, they kept doing it. “In the beginning, I thought it was just them extending charity to me by inviting me over, like, ‘Oh they’re taking pity on me and my lonely soul,’” Nosrat says. “And then, over time as we kept doing it, I realized, ‘Oh, they’re getting something out of this, too.’”
Her regular Monday night dinner crew usually includes six others, some of them children of her friends, as well as the occasional drop-in neighbor, or visitor from out of town. Her friends are not professional cooks, but they are “curious and good eaters,” she says. They’ve been dining together for long enough now where they are starting to form annual traditions, like making mole in the fall and crab in the winter.
Their menu typically comes together casually via group text throughout the week. What do you have in the fridge? What’s leftover from your farm box? Sometimes, Nosrat will bring over new recipes she is testing for her forthcoming cookbook, Good Things, publishing in fall 2025, which she says will be full of the simple dishes that she makes for herself and her loved ones. “The meal is really a lot of cobbling things together and being really delighted by how nice it feels to eat the same parsnip slaw, or whatever you would have been forced to make by yourself, together,” she says.
The spread might vary, but the time and place is always set—Monday nights at her friend’s home nearby, which cuts out the back and forth. “People are often tempted to share the burden by rotating homes, but I actually think one of the reasons we’ve been so successful is we don’t have to be like, ‘Where is it going to be this time? When is it going to be? Do you have the bandwidth to host?’” she says. “We all know this kitchen; we all know what’s there. The steadiness has created a really good foundation to build the rest on.”
Their meals are rooted in the idea of the found family. “I’m largely estranged from my family; there’s a single mother in our group; there are queer people, and I do think it’s a very queer ethic to create your own family and to let that feel like it’s your home,” she says. During hard times, including the pandemic and the death of her father, she leaned on her dinner crew. “I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the value of the limited time that we have on this earth and that the biggest gift we have is to spend time on and with other people,” she says.
After the soaring success of her Netflix show—followed by her New York Times column, appearances with Michelle Obama, and Home Cooking, a pandemic podcast with co-host Hrishikesh Hirway (rest assured fans, she promises more episodes…eventually)—the weekly gatherings give Nosrat something real to hold on to. “The dinners, in a way, are a symbol of the larger shifts in my life, as I’ve been looking a bit deeper at, ‘What is a life of meaning? What is a good life? What makes me feel happy?’” she says. “I paid attention to how I felt during and after those dinners, and I always felt so good.”
And when you find something like that, you protect it. “You really have to work as a community to create a sense of sacredness and holiness around the ritual so that it feels like something you get to do, rather than something you have to do,” she advises.
It can feel similar to the community some people find in church—she and her crew are “only half joking when we’re like, ‘Monday dinner is our religion,’” she says. If you don’t prioritize it and create some structure, then it’s really easy to say: “This Monday doesn’t matter.”
Nosrat rattles off a list of ways to create that sacredness intentionally. Maybe it’s a commitment to drinking the good wine; picking a bouquet from the yard; having the kids set the table; someone making a weekly playlist; or perhaps one guest is a baker, and they always make a loaf for the party, and another for everyone to divide and take home. “Whatever it is, it creates the idea that this is what you all do together in this time and space,” she says. “Then, when someone is missing, you notice. You’re like, ‘Oh, we don’t have music this week.’”
The dinners have inspired her to feed her neighbors in other ways as well. When feeling the powerlessness in the face of huge global crises, she leaned into where she knew she could make a tangible impact: the eight-block radius surrounding her home. “I had this lightbulb moment of like, Oh wait, I’m just one person. I am never going to be able to solve world hunger, or whatever it is. But where I can make a difference, and actually feel and see it, is in my local community.”
Last summer, Nosrat made jam from the fruit trees in her neighborhood (with permission) and sold it to raise money for local organizations, including a nearby public school that serves and supports newly arrived immigrants and refugees. “It’s an incredible place, and to be able to support them with the fruit literally grown on this street was a really profound thing for me,” she says.
The jams raised about $40,000, a sum that wouldn’t go terribly far toward solving world hunger, but here in her own community, it was meaningful. “You plant a tree, and you get to watch that tree grow,” she says with a touch of wonder. “It’s so simple.”
This story is part of our Chef’s Kiss series. Click the link below for all the stories.
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