Santiago Lastra is a 36-year-old chef who dazzles his diners with a new take on Mexican food. He opened his first restaurant, KOL, in Marylebone, London, in 2020, receiving his first Michelin star in 2022. KOL (which means “cabbage” in Mexican Spanish) is now listed in the world’s top 50 restaurants. But this month he will also be found south of the river, running a pop up at Tate Modern to coincide with the museum’s exhibition Frida: The Making of An Icon. Here, he will offer elegant plates of carefully sourced seasonal local ingredients, treated so that they sing with the fresh and spicy flavours of Mexico: coconut, lime, chilli and charring.
This is not the first time Lastra has been granted a space at Tate Modern. In 2017, on his speedy upwards trajectory as an international celebrity chef, he was touring the globe with his evolving Nordic-Mexican cuisine (a particular project was to make tortillas with Nordic grains). His aim: to dispel Mexican cuisine’s reputation as the degraded Tex-Mex version that had dominated outsiders’ views for decades. One stop was a three-day pop up in the museum’s restaurant and a huge success. “I realised I had an opportunity here to bring my culture to different countries,” he says, “using local ingredients but inspired by Mexico.”
Santiago Lastra project managed a Noma pop up in Tulum, in the Yucatán peninsula, which inspired him to focus on Indigenous food, ingredients and techniques Anton Rodriguez
In this, Lastra is part of a new wave of ambitious, creative Mexicans, including friends such as the film director Alejandro González Iñárritu and the designer Fernando Laposse. “It’s a movement,” he says, “of artists in music, cinema, art, gastronomy, design.” He sees food as a central expression of a shared Mexican identity. But also, while touring the world, he had seen the impact of his compatriot Frida Kahlo on Mexico’s global reputation. Now, he wishes to do the same through cooking.
Kahlo has been an inspiration on many levels. Lastra was born in the same district of Mexico City, Coyoacán, as the artist. Kahlo’s early trauma included polio and a life-changing accident at the age of 17; for Lastra, the death of his father and grandparents within a month when he was 14 was a powerful impetus to his creative journey. And if food featured centrally both in Kahlo’s personal life and in her paintings—a significant aspect of the artist’s political and social identity as a Mexican woman, with mestiza heritage, forging a creative language that was defiantly Mexican—so, too, Lastra has found his professional destiny through imagining a hybrid Mexican style of cooking.
Still Life (I Belong to Samuel Fastlich) from 1951 also features in Tate Modern’s show Private collection; courtesy of Tate Modern
Sitting in the downstairs Mezcaleria bar at KOL, which promotes small, specialised producers, as diners upstairs enjoy caviar and ceviche or langoustine tacos, Lastra rapidly spills out the story of how his ambitions grew. A turning point was an invitation by René Redzepi, of the pioneering Copenhagen restaurant Noma, to project manage a Noma pop up in Tulum, in the Yucatán peninsula. Lastra travelled all over the country, interviewing local and Indigenous growers, observing traditional cooks, sampling restaurants, and scouring markets and suppliers. He spent two months in the Yucatán jungle, working with 18 Indigenous villages to discover the foods they sourced and the techniques they used to cook them. “I learned more about Mexico than in the whole of the rest of my life,” Lastra says.
From potters to fishermen
It was then that he realised he wanted to open his own restaurant, to express this new understanding. “It’s about creating a whole ecosystem of chefs, suppliers, farmers, potters, artisans, designers, architects, fishermen, foragers,” he says. “It becomes a whole structure.” He could not do that, he says, at a neighbourhood taquería. “But if you open a fine-dining restaurant that achieves world-class recognition, you can make an impact.”
A work by Fernando Laposse made of corn husk hangs in the reception area @charliemckay
London has become Lastra’s base of choice. Here, he has built a restaurant where architecture and design are as much part of the creation as the sourcing of the wine and ingredients and the cooking. “A restaurant dining room,” he says, “is a movie set.” The Hackney-based interior and furniture design studio A-nrd was charged with the brief. “I wanted this open kitchen, with a clean, Nordic design, and for that to be in the middle of a dining room that resembles a Mexican house of the late 70s, early 80s—a time of optimism.”
Frida was a fantastic host, so I want to create a menu that would be exciting for her
Santiago Lastra
The colour palette pays homage to his homeland in shades of yellow, pink and burnt orange. Tables are crafted from wood and marble, the doors glazed with hand-blown glass, and all the crockery has been commissioned from potters based in the UK. Lastra is a keen collector of Mexican craft, and the sole piece of art on the walls is a large-scale corn-husk panel by Laposse, whom Lastra met in London, which greets visitors at reception.
Food as storyteller
Laposse is famous for using his skills to rebuild communities and ecosystems in his native Mexico, developing furniture and art in heritage corn husks, sisal and loofah. Lastra’s food is crafted with similar care, mixing produce from small UK suppliers with techniques from around the world. He describes taking rye grain selected from an organic grower in Northumberland and fermenting it in a Japanese fashion, before mixing it with Mexican chillies and using it as the basis for a new take on the Mexican mole. “I achieved the flavour of what this lady does in Oaxaca,” he says. “When you do that, you become a storyteller.”
Lastra wanted KOL’s design to re-create a Mexican house of the late 1970s and early 1980s @charliemckay
The summer’s challenge, to create a menu for Frida Kahlo, takes Lastra back to his early admiration for the artist. When as a child he visited La Casa Azul in Coyoacán, it was as much the glamour and conviction of Kahlo and Diego Rivera that impressed him as the art and the simple, bright yellow-and-blue kitchen. In devising his menu for Tate Modern in Kahlo’s honour, he wants to do justice not just to her paintings but to her character. “She was brave and she loved Mexico,” he says. “She loved Indigenous Mexico, which at the time was considered crazy. Beyond that, she was a charismatic soul and a fantastic host, so I want to create a menu that would be exciting for her.”
Given the sensuous brilliance of Mexican foods in her works, which she also used as cultural currency, and the lavish choreography of the couples’ famous dinner parties, known as días de los manteles largos (days of the long tablecloths), Lastra has a lot to live up to. But he is confident in his pursuit. “I think the world is ready for Mexico,” he says, “and Mexico is ready for the world.”
• Frida: The Making of An Icon, Tate Modern, London, 25 June-3 January 2027
