Santiago Lastra interview: ‘For years I wasn’t able to create anything. Nothing was good enough.’

With a Michelin star and a place in the upper echelons of almost every best list going, KOL has cemented a place as one of London’s big restaurant success stories of the last decade.

Four years on from opening, it has the air of a restaurant that knows exactly how good it is. Like so many great restaurants, KOL has an ease that is hard to fake. The gears move silently, well oiled and perfectly calibrated, so you never notice the function behind the form. Staff glide gracefully around the foliage-laden room. The food is complex, distinct, but it never feels like it's trying too hard. Courses come out at a good clip, but the kitchen purrs like a supercar in second gear.

KOL chef patron Santiago Lastra also seems to have a natural affinity for food, but that hasn’t always been the case. Sure, he took to kitchen work instantly - ‘on my first day, I knew this was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life,’ he enthuses - but he struggled for years with actually creating his own dishes. ‘I’d think of a plate and it was just empty,’ he says. ‘I had no ideas. Even after seven years in kitchens, I’d lived in Spain, Denmark, Mexico of course, I’d worked at Mugaritz, but for years I wasn’t able to create anything. Nothing was good enough.’

'That dream really changed my life, because from that point I was able to see flavours in my mind.'

In the end, it was something entirely mundane and unpredictable that switched on the lights in Santi’s creative brain - it all started with an apple.

‘I dreamt about an apple one night, whilst I was asleep,’ Santi explains. He holds an invisible apple in front of him, as if reliving the memory. ‘I was eating the apple, and it was juicy and sweet and really intense. And that dream really changed my life, because from that point I was able to see flavours in my mind. Something just switched in my head, so I felt like I could see flavours the way I could see colours.’

Like the apple that Isaac Newton watched as it fell from a tree in Lincolnshire in the late summer of 1666, Lastra’s apple was his eureka moment - one that he remembers to this day. ‘That was nine years ago,’ he says. ‘It was a life changing moment! It’s like I can see the texture and the different flavours in my mind, and you can really connect with those things.’

The cult of the chef has predisposed us to thinking of chefs as machines of infinite confidence, but despite all the success, Santi is not that. He’s much more thoughtful, introspective about his own creativity, and certainly more of a democrat than a dictator. Lastra arrived in London as a gastronomic golden child - a young, charismatic, disarmingly affable alumnus of Mugaritz, and fresh off a stint as a key player in Rene Redzepi’s Noma Mexico team. Young chefs who cut their teeth at these revered modern European giants always arrive in London with lots of fanfare. KOL was marked for greatness long before it opened, and yet, when Santiago readied himself to open the bookings for the first time, weeks before opening night, the first thought that popped into his head was, ‘what if no-one comes?’

‘It just happened quickly in my mind and I freaked out a little bit,’ he laughs. ‘The reservations opened and I was busy, I just didn’t check my phone for half an hour. The next time I looked we were fully booked for the next three months.’

Since then KOL has become a massively successful restaurant of huge worldwide renown. It’s a constant presence in the UK’s various awards, a Michelin star holder, and has always placed near the top of our own SquareMeal Top 100 Restaurants in London.

You never plan to fail, of course, but success is a double-edged sword - KOL’s accomplishments bring expectation, and pressure to keep upping the game. The restaurant has also developed a huge international reputation over the last few years, and the result is that a hefty portion of its guests come from overseas. ‘If someone has planned a whole trip around us, the experience needs to be better than just okay,’ says Santi. ‘We’re very fortunate that people are still interested in what we do, but there’s a responsibility that comes with people choosing to come to us.’

Some kitchens use that pressure to forge diamonds, but KOL is the opposite. Santiago purposely releases his team from the pressure, instead believing that the restaurant is at its best when the team is unshackled. For example, even when a recipe has been finalised and shared with the kitchen, line chefs will continue to tweak things to keep improving and evolving it over time. ‘If you don’t trust your team and don’t allow them to express themselves, it limits how good you can be,’ Santi says sagely. Some kitchens are gruff, tattooed rock bands, banging out the hits off sheet music; KOL is experimental jazz, scatting, weaving, adapting, evolving.

That constant push to evolve is at the heart of what makes KOL special. On the surface, KOL appears to be a modern Mexican restaurant - at least, that’s the convenient box it has been placed in by mainstream media. We’re obsessed with these boxes, perhaps because they’re quick, safe and secure. We think we know where we stand with 'modern Mexican' food, but KOL is a restaurant that lives in the margins, inhabiting the borderlands between cuisines we feel we understand. It’s a square peg, shoved through a round hole into a box that misunderstands - or purposely ignores - the context of what Santiago is really trying to do.

KOL’s mission statement started as Mexican food through the lens of British ingredients. Santiago has always wanted KOL to become completely local and unreliant on overseas imports, but the distinctiveness of Mexican ingredients makes that a very tricky task. To bridge the gap, KOL runs a complex R&D operation where chefs are constantly experimenting, discovering new ways of using British ingredients.

Nuts and seeds were an early hurdle, says Santiago, and the team spent years finding ways of reproducing certain flavours using native ingredients. He shows us neatly labelled pots of seeds, ranging from off-white to a nutty, caramelised brown. ‘These camelina seeds grow in the UK,’ he explains. ‘We found that when we toast them off to different levels you get different nutty flavour profiles.’ Myriad pots hold different experiments that all feature on this month’s menu, including pickled larch roses, ox heart cured in mezcal, and pine cone jam, where young green pine cones are cooked down in a sugar syrup. The resulting jam is difficult to place flavour-wise - it’s slightly herbaceous, perfumed and citrussy, but definitely its own thing.

There’s clear Noma DNA in KOL’s research-led cooking. Santi reckons that KOL is pretty close to being 100% native British ingredients now, but in four years, R&D has carried KOL so far that the restaurant is no longer as simple as ‘Mexican food, British ingredients’ - it’s something entirely new and hard to define.

'We still want to make amazing regional Mexican food, so a second restaurant makes sense.’

If KOL is the restaurant pushing the ceiling for what Mexican food can become, there’s clearly still room underneath for something more traditional. The restaurant filling that space will be Fonda - Lastra’s second restaurant, due to open towards the end of the year. ‘In the sense of everyday regional food, it’s not possible to do that at KOL anymore, it doesn’t make sense for that restaurant,’ says Santi. ‘We’ve evolved away from that. But we still want to make amazing regional Mexican food, so a second restaurant makes sense.’

So, what can we expect? Santi’s plans for Fonda are mostly under lock and key, but he says we can expect his take on everyday regional Mexican food, with a bit of KOL’s DNA thrown in. ‘We have lots of things we used to use at KOL that we can’t use anymore,’ he explains. ‘It’s exciting because we can use those things at Fonda now.’ We await more news with baited breath, and this time, there’s no danger of no-one showing up when it opens.

If you enjoyed this interview, you can read more interviews with top chefs, including the likes of Chet Sharma, Andrew Wong, Helene Darroze and Aktar Islam.