Bronx-born New York native, chef Lana Lagomarsini — a semifinalist on Top Chef season 22 — is opening her own tasting menu spot centered on the Black culinary diaspora: Creola, named after her grandmother, will debut on the Upper East Side at 1261 Park Avenue, between East 97th and 98th streets, on Wednesday, September 9.
When Lagomarsini started working at Gramercy Tavern in 2015, she moved in with her grandmother. “We were able to connect in a different way over food at that point,” she says. “She just really taught me how to cook and the joy of it.” When she was young and attended private school on the Upper East Side, she’d pick her up and cook for her in the afternoons.
Creola is “inspired by the Black experience, but the Black experience is wide and varied,” Lagomarsini says. “I feel like I can pull upon a lot in that diaspora and never get bored.”
Lana Lagomarsini outside of Creola.
Dining at Creola is meant to feel like a supper club rather than a white-tableclothed dining experience, with its $125 tasting menu and optional $65 wine pairings.
The menu features items like potlikker consomme that pays homage to her grandmother’s collard greens. Her version of the dish, using the leftover broth from cooking greens and beans, also honors her ancestors, former slaves who survived on cornbread and potlikker.
Lagomarsini loves oxtail, pointing to the oxtail pate en croute that riffs on the French pastry-wrapped meat dish, “but made to taste like a Jamaican beef patty with oxtail and plantain and turmeric crust,” she says.
She’ll also feature dishes from her Top Chef run, such as the scallop with beurre blanc, and talks about using smaller birds like quail, seafood like crudos, bringing back her peanut soup (made with pickled shrimp and a suya oil), and teases something she’s working on named the Potato Salad, Crazy-Style. She explains that it’s inspired by the “feeling and dishes of a family cookout,” noting that her mom makes potato salads with eggs and bacon. She envisions her version with a fried component and hollandaise with bacon fat.
The elk with blackberry jerk and plantain at Creola.
A quail dish at Creola.
For dessert, Lagomarsini’s leaning into her love of fruit sweets with a tiramisu, swapping coffee for passionfruit, as well as a goose egg-pavlova topped with sorrel-poached berries and rhubarb. She’s also working on a dessert based on a pastelito (a Cuban stuffed pastry), but envisioned as a Napoleon (a French layered dessert with flaky pastry and cream). “We’re still keeping the flavors of the diaspora,” she says.
Creola is an intimate space, with 14 seats spread across five tables in 300 square feet, designed by Lagomarsini herself, with lots of golds, bronzes, and blues.
The goose egg-pavlova with sorrel-poached berries and rhubarb at Creola.
The passionfruit tiramisu at Creola.
The rest of Lagomarsini’s culinary history includes working under Francis Mallmann in Patagonia and then again as the executive chef of his Uruguay restaurant Garzón. In New York, she’s also worked at Momofuku Ko, Restaurant Daniel, Gramercy Tavern, and Blue Hill at Stone Barns. Before Top Chef, she had been running her own pop-ups and private catering service, Lana Cooks, in Harlem. While the show was airing, she hosted her Supper Club From Nowhere series, exploring Black culinary history throughout the city. She’s also competed in an episode of Pressure Cooker on Netflix in 2023 and Chopped on the Food Network in 2024.
“I’m glad I did it without knowing where it was going to lead, if anywhere,” Lagomarsini says. “I just did it for the vibe, the experience, and then it ended up actually leading to exactly where I wanted to be anyways.”
Creola will be open from 5 to 11 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday. Book reservations online on OpenTable.
Creola.
Dining and Cooking