“Have you seen what the pineapples they sell here in supermarkets look like? White, hard, fibrous, tasteless… What can I do with it? It’s believed that, given the average price per case of over £100, it shouldn’t be too hard to find better pineapples than those sold at Tesco or Sainsbury’s. But of course Kol (9 Seymour Street) is a different restaurant. His concept revolves around Mexican gastronomy, but above all around the local and seasonal. The restaurant is located in a former police station in London’s Mayfair, just a stone’s throw from Oxford Street. This means that Lastra cooks dishes from his home country using ingredients that are also found in the UK. It seems like a big challenge; It’s almost a joke that the score ranks you among the top restaurants in the world.
Lastra finishes a taco. Manuel Vazquez
Santiago Lastra (Cuernavaca, Mexico, 33 years old) started cooking at the age of 15. It was one morning when she found out that the only thing that made her mother smile after her father’s untimely death was locking herself in the kitchen to prepare food. He decided to help. Years later, while working in Russia, he received a message from Rosio Sanchez, then the head pastry chef at Noma restaurant in Copenhagen. He wanted to meet Lastra and see if he would like to join celebrity chef René Redzepi’s team on the adventure of opening a Noma pop-up in the Mexican city of Tulum. “I made it my mission to take them all over the country and teach them products, producers and local cuisines… So at the end of each trip, they told me what they had to cook in Tulum and I got it,” Lastra recalls that cold March morning at one of the tables of the mezcalería Kol hides in his basement. There is nobody else on the premises and almost in the neighborhood. Mexicans like to get up early.
To solidify Kol’s look, A-nrd studio founder Alessio Nardi took a field trip through Mexico. Manuel Vazquez
After the month and a half in spring 2017 when Redzepi opened his Noma in the Caribbean, Lastra remained linked with the Danes until he decided to start his own adventure. “I made a list of what I want the city I want to settle in to be: multicultural, European, big, people like spicy food, the culture is open to our cuisine and it’s a place that has investors.” London won. Back then, London was everything.”
Mexican chef creates a sweet tamale out of chocolate.Manuel Vázquez
He slept on a sofa in a flat an hour from London for a few months. With the savings he funded trips to England during which, without really knowing why, he repeated the hunts for produce, suppliers and traditions he conducted for Redzepi in his native Mexico. Until the savings were gone. “It was then that I discovered British products for myself. Aside from the shellfish and beef, which are fabulous, the Yorkshire rhubarb, lots of leaves and seeds, birch syrup and even fire ants from the Kent area,” he enthuses. He then began working on private events in London and at one of these he met Kol’s investors. “They didn’t even have one restaurant, now they have money in at least four,” he says.
Chalupa with pistachio guacamole, fermented redcurrant.Manuel Vázquez
She brought her brother with her and during the week they tried out recipes in their tiny west London flat, honing the idea of Mexican cooking more out of necessity than conviction. “And things came out that were good and things that weren’t so good. But it tasted best on Sunday, when we used the leftovers to cook more traditional dishes for our friends. And that’s when I remembered that one day while traveling through the North of England I was collecting seeds with a friend and then I made him some tortillas with those seeds at home. And he told me, “You don’t make Mexican food, you make English food.” Eureka. We wanted to create a Mexican tradition with what this country offers us at any time of the year. And it would be neither Mexican nor English.
“I think the big mistake a lot of chefs make is not knowing where their shops are open,” says Lastra. “Because what works here doesn’t necessarily have to work in Madrid or Singapore. You have to understand the public in London. Here the clientele is not always English, but the people who live here, regardless of where they were born, have a profile and one would like to refine that. Usually something very visual is done but with bad content: either everything is good but there is no interesting aspect to it, or everything is very interesting but nothing tastes like anything at all.”
Daisy Col. Instead of lime juice, use yuzu and sweet sake.Manuel Vázquez
In Kol everything is white and everything has a story. From the origin of the ingredients to the dishes or the mezcals served in this 500 square meter space with a rustic feel but without looking like a Mexican theme park that opened in 2020. The kitchen is in the center of the main room. Depending on which table you are sitting at, you can even see the feet of the people working there. By the way, none of them are Mexican. “Anyone can buy the expensive wine that other expensive restaurants have. I prefer to think about everything. It’s a lot of work and it forces you to see every detail, but there’s also something very good about it: when you take that approach, the people who work with you appreciate it and become more involved.” He pauses. “Do you know what I’m looking for? That you’d want to drink a whole pot out of the bite I give you and that if you did you wouldn’t get bloated. Kol’s cuisine is enormously flavorful, familiar in appearance but extremely elaborate, both out of necessity and conviction. “I’m a bit of a slave to my concept, but I’m not just feeding you the concept,” says the Mexican chef of this fabulous trompe-l’oeil he’s put together. We asked him if there was a commitment to sustainability in his approach to Kol’s kitchen. Save tons of CO2 by not flying mangoes or avocados from Mexico to London. “Besides, but that came later, I won’t fool you,” he smiles.
Santiago Lastra, in his restaurant and mezcalería Col. Manuel Vazquez
Before we go, a question that stuck in our minds: what about the pineapple? Because as far as we know there are no pineapple plantations in Wales and Norfolk. “Celery,” Lastra replies. “We boil it to break down the starch in a chamomile tea syrup made from a variety of chamomile grown in Scotland. We cut it like a pineapple slice and grill it. It caramelizes like a pineapple and looks like a pineapple slice. That’s already an ingredient that we have and use for everything. “For example, our grapefruit is rhubarb,” he concludes, pointing to a table listing Mexican ingredients that aren’t found here on one side and local ingredients that could be used to make substitutes on the other. Even mangoes do it.
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