Santiago Lastra
Santiago Lastra
Blending Mexican dishes and techniques with British ingredients, Santiago Lastra is treading a never-seen-before culinary path at his beautiful terracotta-toned London restaurant KOL.
It’s not that long ago that Mexican food in the UK was little more than nachos, burritos and Old El Paso fajita kits – pureed avocado, heaps of cumin, pickled jalapenos and jars of cloyingly sweet ‘salsa’ bullying their way onto our taste buds as some sort of strange distillation of Tex-Mex cuisine. Then we started to scratch the surface of actual Mexican cooking, discovering the joys of proper tacos; deep, rich mole sauces; moreish elotes and soft, comforting tamales. Regional appreciation soon followed – we started seeking out the Yucatan’s cochinita pibil and the tlayudas of Oaxaca, eager to discover one of the world’s truly great cuisines. Chef Santiago Lastra could have gone down this path of recreating true representations of his native Mexico’s most beloved dishes, but he instead decided to do something a little different. By combining British ingredients with the traditions, techniques and flavour combinations of Mexico, he has shone a unique light on the cuisine never seen before.
Santiago entered the restaurant world at fifteen, when he landed his first weekend job at an Italian restaurant in Mexico. ‘Both my parents worked so they didn’t cook much at home but I remember going to the supermarket and buying a box of Ritz crackers, then cooking a recipe for crab dip on the back of the box. My family liked what I made, so I went back and bought a little booklet of Italian recipes and worked my way through those. I got a job at an Italian restaurant to see what it was like and loved being part of the team.’
After the sudden passing of his father, grandfather and grandmother all within the same month, Santiago took a few months out of school to be with his mother and brother, but continued cooking and bringing them back food from the restaurant. ‘When I was cooking for them they were happy after a really bad time in our lives,’ he explains. ‘I think that confirmed for me that I wanted to cook for the rest of my life.’
Santiago didn’t want to just stay put in Mexico and cook Mexican food – he wanted to travel; to experience the new frontiers of cooking and work with the chefs who were pushing boundaries in internationally renowned restaurants. However, this was back in 2002 when social media was yet to exist, and being in Mexico meant it was quite tough to find out who these chefs were and what they were doing. ‘I thought French cuisine was the new thing, so I moved to Paris. But when I got there I realised more exciting stuff was happening in Spain, so I went there instead. Then when the New Nordic movement was happening I knew I had to move to Copenhagen. During a trial at Relais I was talking to a chef about how I was looking for the next big thing in cooking and he told me it was Latin American – specifically Mexican – cuisine! I realised that by the time you think you’ve found the new big thing, it’s old. I was never going to understand innovation by chasing it – I needed to set out on my own.’
While Santiago’s description of how he hopped from country to country in pursuit of innovation might be brief, along the way he soaked up a wealth of experience working at the likes of Mugaritz in Spain and Noma in Copenhagen – two world-class restaurants that certainly gave him a taste of what cooking at the very highest level looked like. ‘I obviously learned so much, but I was not being creative at all,’ he says. ‘In the first ten years of professional cooking I never dared create my own dishes because I just kept my head down, worked long hours and practised techniques. But when I turned twenty-five, something changed. I saw how places like Noma were using Japanese techniques to cook local ingredients; why couldn’t I do the same using the methods of Mexican cooking?’
Until this point, Santiago had never really cooked Mexican food in a professional capacity – he had been focused on European cooking instead. When he returned to Mexico he read about, studied and tasted as much of the country’s food as he could. When Noma launched its now-legendary pop-up Noma Mexico in Tulum in 2017, Santiago was asked to spearhead it, travelling around the country for months on research trips discovering the individuals, communities, markets and ingredients that make Mexican cooking so special.
Noma Mexico might have been where Santiago first made a name for himself, but it was in Tulum that the idea for KOL – an entirely new concept – came about. ‘In European cooking, a lot of the same ingredients can be found in Spanish, French and Italian food, but what makes them all distinct is the people and the culture. In Mexico, it’s different – because it’s such a huge country, the local ingredients change depending on where you are. In the south they might make a type of sauce with mango; in the east they’d use plantain; in the north they’d use pears or olives. I wanted to reflect this in a restaurant in the UK, as if Britain was just another region of Mexico – using the local ingredients to create Mexican dishes.’
This approach to cooking Mexican food (‘an adaptation rather than fusion cooking,’ says Santiago) hasn’t really been seen before, especially using British ingredients. While Santiago still sources dry ingredients such as corn, cacao and dried chillies from Mexico, the rest of what he works with is rarely found in a Mexican restaurant. Fennel, woodruff, seaweed – these are the ingredients Santiago turns to for similar flavour profiles to the limes, avocados and plantains used in traditional Mexican cooking. ‘We can be on the shores of Skye in Scotland and cook Mexican food now,’ he says. ‘It’s not just about the ingredients anymore and I think that’s really cool, you know? My main goal is to highlight and promote the idea of Mexican culture and cuisine, but also to show that you can use all sorts of ingredients to create it. So many traditional Mexican dishes are created from international influences anyway, due to immigration and different communities coming to the country over the years, so in a way I’m just expanding that idea by using the best ingredients around me.’
It was a rocky start for KOL, which opened amidst the various pandemic lockdowns of 2020 and 2021. Once it was finally able to lift off properly and welcome guests on a regular basis, however, it became clear just how special the restaurant and Santiago’s cooking is. It’s so much more than ‘Mexican-British fusion’ (which conjures up some pretty strange thoughts of roast dinner tacos or guacamole pies). Instead, it’s Mexican food that just happens to be cooked with British ingredients. Only a truly gifted chef could pull something like that off, and Kol’s instant smash-hit success – which won a Michelin star in 2022 – proves Santiago was certainly the man for the job.
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