Q&A: Santiago Lastra
The chef behind the exciting new Kol restaurant on cooking Mexican food with British ingredients, working with René Redzepi, and the power of food to bring joy to even the most troubled of times
Interview: Clare Finney
Images: Haydon Perrior, HDG Photography
Kol was initially scheduled to open in autumn 2018. How did you end up opening two years and a global pandemic later?
In total it has taken me three years to get the concept, find the investment, find the site and develop the menu. Even after I had business partners and had found the site, it was a year until we got it, during which time I was making research trips—to Scotland to find suppliers, to Mexico with my business partners—and working on the furniture and décor with our material designers. My house became a test kitchen; I lived upstairs and the entire downstairs—the dining room, the living room—was transformed. In the backyard we had a tent in which we set up a dining room. Over the course of 10 months we developed 150 dishes, inviting press every so often to try them. Then in March the opening was delayed again, so we took our whole management team to Mexico. We made mole with indigenous ladies, we visited taco stands and restaurants—it was unforgettable. Many of them had never been before. Then this whole virus happened, and we had to stop everything for six months, and that was really difficult. We had to wait until August before we could even start building again.
You’re best known internationally for your work with René Redzepi on his Noma Mexico project, but here in Marylebone we know you from your sell-out guest chef stints at Carousel. How important a role has Carousel played in shaping your career?
The first dinner I cooked at Carousel was the very first time I had ever cooked my own food in a restaurant. I was working as a chef de partie in Sweden, and one night my friend and I decided to make Mexican dinner for 20 people, but we couldn’t get any ingredients, so we ended up making Nordic Mexican food. For some reason, Ollie Templeton at Carousel saw a post from the evening on Instagram, and reached out to us. My friend Alex couldn’t make it, so I came. It felt like a dream, arriving at 5am with my knives and walking out of Baker Street station. The dinner was so successful, and I’ve been back five times. I’m good friends with the Carousel team, and the guests seem to connect with me and enjoy it. So, when I was looking for locations I had a really nice feeling of home here. It felt comfortable. Marylebone is comfortable and not pretentious, but it has a stamp of quality.
You describe your food as “Mexican soul, British ingredients”. You don’t even have limes or avocadoes in your store cupboard. How have you managed that?
Mexico is such a big country; it’s 7,000km long, and the weather and the landscape change from one region to another. Yet the general flavour and spirit of Mexican food is the same wherever you go, because what links it is not geography or climate, but people: the people that make the food, and the approach they have culturally. What I wanted to do was imagine that the UK is an island that is part of Mexico; to take the Mexican approach and create Mexican flavours with British ingredients. We bring dry ingredients from Mexico—corn, chilli and chocolate—but all the fresh ingredients are from the UK. Instead of mango, we use butternut squash, cooked to a certain temperature and then blended. Instead of limes we use kombucha, or fermented gooseberries or, at this time of year, unripe pears. Instead of avocadoes we use Scottish pine oil and pistachios to make a sort of guacamole. These are flavours which are Mexican, but which you couldn’t find in Mexico. They are unique to here.
How does Mexico’s cultural attitudes shape and unite its cuisine?
In Mexico, there is no point in eating anything that is not totally delicious—because it’s what we have. We don’t have the best economy in the world, we aren’t the most organised people in the world, but if you go to Mexico City at lunchtime, you will see office workers emerging out onto the streets, flicking their tie over their shoulder and eating tacos with tears in their eyes because they are so excited about it. And I think we share that feeling with other countries, like Italy and Spain. We live to eat; and if you live to eat, you need to eat amazing food. If it’s not super delicious, there is no point.
That’s a stark contrast to Londoners at lunch hour, hunched over their desk with a shop-bought sandwich...
It is different—but then, you get things done. You don’t stay eating for three hours; you eat and you keep working. I love the sense of ambition and achievement London has. Everyone here wants to change the world.
In 2017, you led René Redzepi’s Noma in Mexico project. How did that come about?
I was living in Russia, in St Petersburg, working for a restaurant group that wanted me to create a special Mexican menu. I was just in the middle of demonstrating the menu to the chefs—there was a guy filming, and it was difficult because of the language barrier—when I got a Facebook message from Rosio Sánchez, then head of pastry at Noma, asking if I was in Copenhagen and free to meet. I didn’t understand why she was messaging—she had never messaged before—but I told her, yes, I was in Copenhagen. I finished my work and flew straight to Denmark the following day. I’d met René before, at events and conferences, but it’s like a priest meeting the Pope: you never think he’ll remember you. It turned out he did remember me, though. He is a machine—he remembers everything. We started chatting, he told me what they wanted to do in Mexico, and asked if I wanted to be project manager. It would mean going to Mexico, organising research trips and finding ingredients from the whole country. It sounded amazing, but the thing was, I didn’t know anything about Mexico. I hadn’t been there for five years and I knew nothing about the country beyond the beach where I grew up. He said: “It’s fine. We will discover Mexico together.”
What did the job involve?
From that moment I had two weeks to organise our first research trip. There were seven us—René, me and the Noma R&D team—and we took 16 flights in 14 days. I contacted authors, chefs, farmers, producers. René would say: “I need this fruit or that vegetable,” and I would have to find people who could grow it. When we finally came to the first tasting, there were 200 or 300 ingredients involved, and I’d had to find them all. The pop up lasted 10 days, and I lost 10 kilos and my girlfriend, but it was incredible. There were 40,000 people on the waiting list. People flew over from Japan just to eat there. It was life changing for me in terms of understanding what we have in Mexico, and Noma’s approach: not Noma’s food, so much as the way it creates communities and showcases the quality of a culture and its cuisine.
How have you gone onto apply that learning to Kol?
I took that understanding of the importance of research trips, of making connections and finding suppliers. I know all our suppliers for Kol. I have been with them diving for langoustines and scallops, I’ve visited the small pig farmers and vegetable growers. To produce these things using bad practices is easy; but there are a small number of people doing the right thing, even though it is harder and more expensive, and people don’t always understand. To have the opportunity to champion these people is amazing. We are not a small restaurant, even with the social distancing restrictions, so we can really focus on who we support and make a difference to their lives and work.
How did you come to be a chef?
I didn’t always know I wanted to be a chef. I was working in an Italian restaurant, which I enjoyed, but I didn’t know for sure it was what I wanted with my life. I just knew I wanted to travel the world, and to do something big. Then at 15, I lost my father and my grandmother within the same month. It was very sad, and I didn’t go to school for two or three weeks—but I did go to the restaurant. I felt safe there. I brought food home for my mum and brother, and then I cooked for them, and in that moment, we were happy. It wasn’t that we didn’t care, but we were excited about something that we were sharing and enjoying, and I thought, if we can be happy in this really sad moment, just by me making this food, then this is what I want to do forever. I believe hospitality has healing properties. To have a meeting with someone is one thing, but to have a meal with them is something else; it adds another layer of connection. Now, in this terrible time, instead of being stressed out by what is happening to the world, I am able to cook for people, to give good things to people, to create a moment that gets rid of this bad feeling.
How has that shaped your food?
For some chefs, cooking is more about ego. They cook for themselves—and that’s fine—but for me, hospitality is a humble profession. You work for someone else to be happy, and that makes you happy in turn. It’s the same when it comes to food: for years, there has been a competition between fine dining, and traditional foods. But I think it is a false competition, because at some point tradition was innovation, and that innovation was so good, it lasted for generations. For me as a chef, the real question is: how do you do that? How do you create something that is so good, people taste it and it tastes both new and like it has existed forever? It tastes interesting, and exciting, but it also makes sense.
What is the meaning behind the name Kol?
Kol means cabbage in Spanish, and it came from us wanting to show that things that have been historically undervalued can be special if you believe in them. This is true of British ingredients, and it is true of Mexican culture and cuisine. That is how it started—but I think since the pandemic it has evolved somewhat, into a reflection of our generation and the times that we live in. We have had a chance to stop and look again at things that we previously undervalued; to put them back in context, appreciate them and—hopefully—create something unique.