From the Land to the Table: Storytelling through Cultural Cuisine

From the Land to the Table: Storytelling through Cultural Cuisine

Join us for a special event at Oliver Kelley Farm celebrating culinary placemaking. We’ll explore cuisines from Mexico, Venezuela, and the Philippines with hands-on cooking demonstrations and a shared meal. Through personal stories and recipes, this program, facilitated by food writer and educator Ánh-Hoa Thị Nguyễn, highlights how migration shapes not only identity, but also relationships to land, memory, and nourishment.

Optional shuttle bus transportation will be provided to and from Oliver Kelley Farm in Elk River, MN, starting from the Minnesota History Center in St. Paul, MN. If you'd like to utilize the free shuttle service to and from the Minnesota History Center, please email engagement@mnhs.org.

Program Timeline:

- 2:15 pm: Shuttles departing from the Minnesota History Center

- 3 pm: Shuttles arriving at Oliver Kelley Farm

- 3:15-7 pm: Program and dinner

- 7:15 pm - Shuttles departing from Oliver Kelley Farm

Céleste Macias (they/she) is a queer, first-generation eldest daughter of Mexican immigrants — a keeper of recipes, stories, and traditions. As a community chef, plant auntie, and community organizer, Céleste weaves food as medicine into vibrant community meals to support emotional, physical, and spiritual well-being. Through their multi-dimensional business, Nopalli Rebelde, Céleste also honors traditional ways of cooking and preparing plant medicine by sharing knowledge through skillshares and plant gatherings. Rooted in the belief that la cultura cura (culture heals), their work centers alimentos rebeldes (rebel foods) that resist disconnection by reclaiming ancestral knowledge, land-based practices, and cultural memory.

Soleil Ramirez is a Venezuelan chef, entrepreneur, and storyteller whose journey is as powerful as the cuisine she creates. Originally trained in business, she transitioned into the culinary world driven by a deep passion for food, quickly rising through the industry and becoming a chef and business partner at a young age.

After being forced to leave Venezuela due to political instability, Soleil arrived in the United States with limited resources but unwavering determination. She rebuilt her life through hard work, talent, and vision—eventually opening her own concepts and, in 2023, launching Crasqui in Saint Paul.

Her cuisine is an expression of identity and memory—blending traditional Venezuelan flavors with global techniques, while honoring her roots, her family, and the journey that brought her here. Through Crasqui, Soleil creates more than a dining experience: she builds community, celebrates culture, and invites guests to feel, connect, and belong.

Executive Chef Jailin Tabares is a Filipina, born and raised in Bato, Toledo City, Cebu, Philippines. Her passion for culinary arts, unbeknownst to her, started as a young child assisting her mother and lola (grandma) in the outdoor "dirty kitchen" preparing the family meals. At the age of seven, she would be found with a knife in hand ready to clean the fresh catch of the day from her fisherman father and brother.

Jailin learned of organic cooking before the word organic was in Webster’s dictionary, harvesting fruit and vegetables grown in her backyard, butchering raised chickens and pigs, along with having an abundance of the fresh seafood.

It is this experience that led her to mastering the family recipes that have been handed down from generation to generation of sustainable organic cooking. With over 30 years as a chef in a five-star establishment and expanding her international culinary skills she has great pleasure in offering her Bisayan Filipino flavors to the Twin Cities.

Ánh-Hoa Thị Nguyễn is a refugee, poet, community artist, curator, educator, and food scholar/writer. Her most recent publication is a food essay titled “Buy 10 Get 1 Free! Open Letter to Bánh Mì Wanna Be’s” in What We Hunger For: Refugee and Immigrant Stories about Food and Family, edited by Sun Yung Shin 신 선 영.