Pasta lovers of the world unite: We’re celebrating our love for food and travel writing with Jen Lin-Liu’s On The Noodle Road: From Beijing to Rome with Love and Pasta.

Jen will cook for us! And read and talk about how she hopped on the Silk Road in an attempt to find the trail of how noodles made their way from China to Italy and what they left on the path. Food and hospitality are the shortest distance from her life to the lives of the women and men she meets on her journey, and her “intimate, penetrating portraits of the people she encounters” [Daily Beast] connect us with the hurts and aspirations that unfurl in kitchens everywhere.

Joining her for the conversation will be Francis Lam, food writer, Top Chef judge, and cookbook editor extraordinaire.

Jen Lin-Liu was born in Chicago and raised in Southern California. Lin-Liu attended Columbia University and went to China in 2000 as a Fulbright Fellow. The founder of Black Sesame Kitchen, a Beijing cooking school, she is the author of Serve the People: A Stir-Fried Journey Through China. She has written about food, culture, and travel for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Saveur, Newsweek,Travel + Leisure, Newsweek International, The Chronicles of Higher Education, and other publications. She lives in Chengdu, China.

Francis lam was a staff writer at the late, lamented Gourmet, before Condé Nast bean-cutters shut down the magazine in 2009. He then wrote for Salon.com and edited beautiful features at Gilt Taste before landing his current gig editing cookbooks at Clarkson Potter, publishers of glossy tomes by the likes of the Lee Brothers, Martha Stewart, Mario Batali, José Andrés, and Hugh Acheson. He graduated from the University of Michigan and the Culinary Institute of America.

Tickets available here.