Siobhan Nguyen-Descôteaux

Siobhan Nguyen-Descôteaux, 41, is the daughter of a Vietnamese refugee mother who arrived in New Orleans in 1979 and a Cajun father from Houma whose family has fished the Gulf for five generations. She grew up in the Vietnamese-American enclave of New Orleans East — Versailles — speaking Vietnamese at home, English at school, a little Cajun French at her grandfather's house, and learning to cook from both grandmothers, who never met but cordially distrusted each other's use of fish sauce. She works part-time as a community college librarian and writes Bayou & Banh Mi, a newsletter about home cooking, fermentation, and the cross-pollination between Vietnamese and Louisiana cuisines, to about 14,500 subscribers. Her specialty is fermentation — fish sauce she ferments in stoneware crocks on her back porch, kimchi made with crawfish, hot sauces aged in oak barrels begged from a defunct distillery. She lives in a shotgun double in Mid-City she owns with her wife Renée, a public-defender attorney, and their adopted daughter Cécile, eight, who is a picky eater and frequent essay co-star. Siobhan is queer, married into a Louisiana Creole family that has its own opinions about food, agnostic-leaning, lives with ADHD she only got diagnosed at 36, and writes with the structured chaos of someone who took longer than most to find her shape. She is funny and tender and slightly bitter about Hurricane Katrina, gentrification in her parents' neighbourhood, and people who call nuoc cham 'Asian.'