‘It’s easy to copy something good, but it’s hard to create something good from scratch,’ chef Santiago Lastra tells me over dinner in Mexico City, where we are travelling a few months before the opening of his new London restaurant, Fonda. ‘You can make a technically perfect copy of the Mona Lisa, and that will be a “good” painting, but to stand in front of a blank canvas, create something original and know by the end that you have created something worthwhile? That’s a challenge.’
It is a challenge Lastra has already proven he can meet. As a young chef, he left his native Mexico and spent years working at some of the world’s most renowned restaurants, including Mugaritz in Spain and Noma in Copenhagen, before settling in London and opening his own restaurant, Kol, in 2020. If Lastra’s end goal is to create something original, Kol is certainly that, a fine dining restaurant that uses only British ingredients to translate the flavours and techniques of Mexico into genre-defying dishes. To the question of whether it’s worthwhile, well, you would be hard-pressed to find a more rousing endorsement than a Michelin Star and the number 17 spot on the world’s 50 Best Restaurants in just four years.
