‘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.
Fonda, a London restaurant inspired by ‘delicious’ Mexico
But with Fonda, Lastra and his team are doing something different still –taking the traditional fonda – a small, family-run restaurant typically in a converted garage – and turning it into a fine dining experience that works for a London crowd. The menu, like at Kol, is impressive for its innovative interpretation of Mexican cuisine, but it is more casual and accessible than its forebear. Some stand-out dishes include a roasted pumpkin seed mole and rectangular totopos that may well be the best chips and dip you have ever had; and the Baja tacos with beer-battered Cornish cod and Lastra’s own interpretation of guacamole made from pistachio and cucumber instead of avocado.
In keeping with the essence of traditional fonda cooking, corn and a comal machine used for producing tacos and tostadas, is the driving force behind the menu. The corn used to create the tortillas is sourced in collaboration with Tamoa, a social enterprise founded by the couple Francisco Musi and Sofia Caserin that connects native corn farmers from Mexico with restaurants in locally and abroad to keep endangered species of corn in demand. For Fonda, that means not only supporting communities that grow diverse heirloom crops but using the highest-quality corn possible as the basis for every dish, with a far more complex flavour profile than your standard yellow cob.
For the interiors, Lastra worked with Alessio Nardi of A_nrd Design Studio to create a space with the vibrancy and welcoming, relaxed atmosphere of a traditional fonda but translated into a modern code. On every table is a sala stand, a standard feature of any fonda, although this one is rendered in black stone and filled with three speciality salsas. The bottles for the tequila and wine, all Fonda’s own brand, are decorated with labels inspired by the graphics of Mexico City’s subway system.
The Mexico City-based designer Fernando Laposse was essential to the design of the space, having created several bespoke pieces for the restaurant, as well as introducing the team to other Mexican designers who contributed. Laposse is best known for transforming natural materials like loofahs and corn leaves into inspired design objects, and for Fonda, he created three patchwork panels dyed with pigments made from crushed cochineal insects and marigolds. In a way, the piece is a stand-in for the paper party flags found in traditional fondas, with its interplay of various colours and gentle movement around the room, but reimagined in a contemporary design context. Laposse also designed ‘Wild Beast’ for the space, a bright pink sloth whose shaggy coat is woven from agave fibres using traditional techniques from Oaxaca.
Other notable design features include the work of MA Estudio, whose founder, Melissa Avila, collaborates with local artisans around Mexico to create her pieces. All the craftsmen and women Avila works with still use ancestral techniques to make their designs, and by creating a new market for their work, Avila hopes to help preserve traditional craftsmanship around Mexico and create a sustainable income opportunity for the artisans.
‘Every restaurant is an ecosystem,’ says Lastra a day before Fonda’s official opening and what he has done in this case certainly proves that to be true. The food, the atmosphere, the service, the interior designers and the suppliers all work together towards one central goal – to celebrate Mexico as it really is, a place that is, in Lastra’s words, ‘delicious, filled with people who love to have a good time and filled with colour’.
Lastra is located at 12 Heddon St, London W1B 4BZ, fondalondon.com
