Meet Our #BLESSED Guests!

Are you as excited for #BLESSED as we are? This year we've got three very special guests coming" Cooking With Nana, Chef Phet of Khe-yo and Itsara of White Tiger Distillery. Check them out below!

If you’ve ever looked up recipes on Lao food then you already know Cooking with Nana. The Youtube channel of Nana Sanavongsay originally started as a way to help her friends make some of her favorite Lao dishes. Nana currently has 100+ videos uploaded, viewed 7.7 million times with almost 50K subscribers since 2011. Along with her family (husband Alisak is cameraman, and her children sometimes make appearances) Nana shares her take on cooking Lao recipes in her own kitchen. Even with her success, Nana remains humble, yet enthusiastic for the Lao food community, adding that her fans will often share their own techniques of cooking.

Growing up in small-town Wichita Kansas, Phet Schwader spent his youth resenting the traditional Laotian lunches his mother packed for him. Thankfully Mom’s influences paid off when Phet secured his first job as a fry cook, incorporating those flavors into his dishes and the rest is delicious history. Having opened Khe-Yo, the first fine-dining Lao restaurant in New York City, Chef Phet’s dishes have opened the possibilities of what Lao modern cuisine could look and taste like. He’s been featured on New York Times, Conde Nast Traveler, Vices Munchies and Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown Edible History. Join us in Philly for #BLESSED 2018 to see what he’s cooking up for dinner!

Having served 20 years in the U.S. Army, retired veteran Itsara Ounnarath didn’t just celebrate with drinks - he made his own liquor. His company White Tiger Distillery, LLC is the first American label to produce laoLao alcohol from sticky rice, with a distillery located right in Forest Hills, Maryland. Captain Itsara is often on hand to give tours and share samples of White Tiger which also includes aged rice whiskey and Coquito, a coconut liqueur (a nod to his wife Nory who is Puerto Rican). Not for the faint-of-heart, the 120 proof spirit packs a punch, which you don’t notice it at first until it sneaks up on you - very much like a white tiger. Who’s ready to party with the Captain and his laoLao?

#BLESSED tickets are still available but they're going fast! Get them here.