About Edgar Rico & Sara Mardanbigi
Edgar Rico is the chef and co-owner of Nixta Taqueria in East Austin. In a single awards season he received the MICHELIN Young Chef Award and the James Beard Award for Emerging Chef — two of the most significant recognitions available to a working chef — alongside placement on the TIME100 Next list and Food & Wine’s Best New Chef. He built all of it from a 600-square-foot taqueria dedicated to heirloom corn and the ancient technique of nixtamalization, cooking tortillas from masa ground in-house from heritage varietals sourced from small farms in Mexico. Before Nixta, Rico worked at Uchi and other Austin kitchens, and his approach to cooking is as shaped by hip hop culture as it is by classical culinary training.
Sara Mardanbigi is his wife and co-owner, and the operational and creative force behind Nixta’s day-to-day reality. She runs front-of-house, manages the business side of the restaurant, and is central to the culture and community focus that defines how Nixta operates. Together they have built one of the most recognized independent restaurants in the country without compromising the size, the sourcing, or the team culture that made the restaurant worth building.
Episode Overview
Nixta Taqueria is 600 square feet. It has one tortilla press, a 48-hour fermented masa, and heirloom corn sourced directly from farming families in Mexico. It also has a MICHELIN Young Chef Award, a James Beard Award for Emerging Chef, and a spot on the TIME100 Next list. In this episode, André Natera sits down with Edgar Rico and Sara Mardanbigi to talk about what that season of recognition actually felt like from inside a tiny kitchen — and what they had to protect to keep from losing what made Nixta worth building in the first place.
Edgar talks about how hip hop shaped his creative instincts and how that shows up in the food, what the James Beard and MICHELIN recognition changed and what it didn’t, and how the discipline of nixtamalization became the philosophical foundation of the entire restaurant. Sara gets into the pressure of managing explosive growth without losing the culture they built, why team well-being is treated as a non-negotiable, and what the partnership between a chef and an operator actually looks like when both people are fully invested. This is a conversation about what it means to build something worth protecting and then actually protect it.
Topics covered in this episode:
- How Nixta Taqueria was built and what nixtamalization means to the menu and the mission
- Receiving the MICHELIN Young Chef Award and James Beard Emerging Chef in the same season — and what that pressure felt like
- How hip hop shaped Edgar Rico’s creative instincts and approach to cooking
- Sourcing heirloom corn directly from farming families in Mexico and why that matters
- Managing national recognition without losing the culture and scale that made Nixta work
- The partnership between chef and operator — what Sara Mardanbigi actually runs and why it matters
- Team well-being as a core operational value, not an afterthought
- Storytelling in the kitchen — how food becomes a vehicle for cultural identity
- What it takes to build and sustain a restaurant rooted in community rather than hype
Links & Resources
Edgar Rico on Instagram: @edgarrico
Sara Mardanbigi on Instagram: @saramardanbigi
Nixta Taqueria on Instagram: @nixtataqueria
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