Creola opened in New York City on Sept. 9. | Photo by Clay Williams
Three weeks in after opening Creola, her first restaurant, Lana Lagomarsini doesn’t have time to feel stressed. It’s been a whirlwind of Friends and Family dinners, opening night, juggling reservations for the tiny 14-seat space, and getting her sous chef comfortable with the tasting menu.
As if that pressure wasn’t enough, Lagomarsini broke her wrist while roller skating a week before her soft opening, and after finalizing the multi-course opening menu, she wasn’t able to cook it.
Lana Lagomarsini at her Friends and Family dinner. | Photo by Pat Cobe
But the chef-owner remained calm, a personality trait that will work in her favor long after opening day.
“There’s not really a lot of time to be stressing. I just have to focus on what needs to get done and keep going forward,” she said.
Although she admits that the broken wrist was the toughest challenge she had to overcome, there were numerous little ones along the way. Creola is in New York City, where miles of red tape can snarl the best-laid plans. But her vision remained in focus from lease signing to opening day — a period of just six months.
She found her voice, and then the space
After graduating from the Culinary Institute of America, Lagomarsini spent 10 years in fine-dining restaurants, cooking at some of the best, including Restaurant Daniel, Momofuku Ko, and Blue Hill at Stone Barns. When restaurant work dried up during the pandemic, she launched Lana Cooks, a personal chef business. She had a steady clientele used to restaurant-quality food and they didn’t want to give it up when they were forced to stay home. It was easy to get started and build her business, Lagomarsini said.
Then in 2021, she added pop-ups to Lana Cooks “to sustain my artistic side,” she said. “I wanted to push my own voice as a chef, to figure out what I wanted to say with food.”
That voice is a compilation of Lagomarsini’s family culture combined with her culinary skills, fine-dining pedigree, and New York City upbringing. Her grandmother Creola — the restaurant’s namesake — was born in Dixon Mills, Alabama, and “she was a huge influence on my cooking and the way my family eats,” Lagomarsini said. “My mom’s side is mostly from the South, but my dad’s side is from Puerto Rico.” Foods like pot likker, oxtail, cornbread, plantains, and jerk show up on Creola’s tasting menu, reimagined through Lagomarsini’s culinary lens.
Creola’s opening tasting menu. | Photo by Clay Williams
In 2024, Lagomarsini was invited to apply to be a contestant on Bravo’s Top Chef and was accepted. That competitive environment gave her a chance to further develop her voice.
“My season was not viciously competitive, so it felt more like an incubator space,” she said. Lagomarsini ended up winning a Quickfire Challenge and her teams earned some elimination wins. Plus, Top Chef gave her the opportunity to explore her culinary ethos and expand her skills. “My cooking is at a level that it wasn’t at prior to the show,” she said.
While her season was airing in 2025, Lagomarsini created the “Supper Club from Nowhere” series, hosting multi-course dinners around New York that explored the city’s Black culinary history. She still didn’t believe this would all lead to opening her own restaurant. But she was at a point where she felt she had found her true voice as a chef when a space practically fell into her lap.
“I was living abroad, working at Francis Mallman’s restaurant in Uruguay, and this space opened up right before I left. It was basically turnkey because the woman who had it before me was using it as a tasting room for her catering business,” said Lagomarsini.
The two chefs had connected through Les Dames d’Escoffier New York, a nonprofit membership organization for women in food, fine beverage, and hospitality. The caterer was expanding and needed a larger space, but the tiny footprint and location close to the edge of Harlem on the Upper East Side of Manhattan was just the right place for Lagomarsini to express her voice by showcasing the cooking of the Black diaspora.
Staying the course
Lagomarsini signed the lease while in South America, came back to New York in March of this year, and got to work creating a restaurant.
“I applied for all the permits and licenses first. Having worked in restaurants, I knew I needed certain requirements to open and that could take a while,” she said. Getting a beer and wine license took the longest and was the biggest challenge, she added. Right now, she isn’t applying for a full liquor license.
“I can’t imagine a world where I’d have space to put a bar, and getting a liquor license is just so much more work, money, and time. It didn’t seem necessary for a tasting menu spot that’s open only four days a week,” Lagomarsini said.
The corner banquette came with the space, but tables, chairs, and plates were donated. | Photo by Erik Bernstein
Creola’s kitchen was already built out and well-equipped from the former tenant — a stroke of luck — but the bathroom had to be moved, which was an unexpected setback. While that was happening and Lagomarsini dealt with the usual NYC contractor woes, she multi-tasked on procuring furnishings for the restaurant.
“Some of the tables and chairs were donated by restaurant friends and other furniture I bought upstate at antiques shops. And one of my mentors gave me plates,” she said. “The banquette seating and wallpaper were already in place.” There are also several handmade touches; Lagomarsini sewed the curtains herself and the napkins were hand-embroidered by a friend. The room’s décor and feeling creates a cozy supper club vibe.
Set next to a hand-embroidered napkin is an elk chop with blackberry jerk. | Photo by Erik Bernstein
The space she chose is intentionally small to keep her budget small. The chef-owner was able to self-fund the restaurant with investments from a few family members and friends, plus money she won from her Top Chef competition, and industry pals have been very helpful in getting Creola off the ground, she said.
“I’ve been very lucky to be able to call on my mentors for advice, finding out how things worked for people in the past when they opened restaurants. I truly seek out their advice and take it into account.”
Staffing is minimal. Aside from her sous chef, Lagomarsini hired a dishwasher and a server. Because the restaurant is small and does about 25 covers nightly with 2 to 2½ table turns, it’s manageable. “I could probably do it on my own, and I know my sous chef can do it on her own, too,” she said. “Once I’m healed, it’ll be that much easier for both of us.” Lagomarsini admits the sous chef has “picked up the lion’s share of the work” in the opening weeks, and chef friends have also pitched in while she recovers.
Lagomarsini seems unusually chill for a chef opening her first restaurant with a broken wrist in a cast.
“She has a naturally cool, calm disposition,” said Lauren Monroe, founder of Monroe Media House, who is working with Lagomarsini to get the word out about Creola. “When she went into surgery the day before her official opening [Sept. 9], she just rolled with it, which speaks to her personality and leadership; she just stayed focused and didn’t let it derail her. And she was on time with everything — very rare with restaurant openings that often get pushed and pushed later and later.”
A menu filled with flavor and legacy
The menu was the easy part, Lagomarsini admits. “The African diaspora is huge, and Black culture extends so far, and that’s what I want to celebrate,” she said. “I didn’t grow up seeing that celebrated in the cooking world, and I’m trying to do it through my own unique lens.”
Throughout her fine-dining experience, she learned incredible techniques, she notes, but she wasn’t seeing any of the flavors she grew up with. Now the chef is combining those techniques and those flavor memories on Creola’s menu — a tasting experience developed intentionally to work within the small space.
The tasting menu includes Low Tide in Lagos, a take on scallop crudo. | Photo by Erik Bernstein
The opening menu featured five courses plus an amuse called “Snacks,” a shareable plate highlighted by deviled eggs and pimento cheese gougères. She names each dish to connect it literally or figuratively to the African diaspora. “Low Tide in Lagos” is scallop crudo in a pool of Alabama white barbecue sauce topped with salsa matcha, a little smoked trout and trout roe, and a bit of cilantro.
Next up is “Patty en Crute” a play on a French classic done in the style of a Jamaican beef patty, composed of oxtail and plantain enclosed in a pastry crust flavored with turmeric and curry. A side salad has a vinaigrette flavored with calypso hot sauce, a condiment from the West Indies. It’s a riff of one of her Top Chef dishes.
Potlikker consommé with trout and cornbread croutons has roots in Black Southern cooking. | Photo by Erik Bernstein
“Ancestral” features her collard green “potlikker” consommé, a recipe component that also appeared on Top Chef. The consommé is topped with a rosy piece of trout and cornbread croutons that have been roasted in the trout fat. “Blue Smoke Mountains” evokes Appalachia by way of the Caribbean. The meaty course includes a generous roasted elk chop with blackberry jerk and plantain.
Lagomarsini’s love of passion fruit inspired “Yellow Velvet Cake,” a tiramisu-like dessert with a creamy passion fruit filling in place of the usual coffee-flavored mascarpone. The tasting menu is priced at $125 per person with an optional $65 wine pairing for each course, but sparkling, white, and red wines are also available by the glass and bottle.
Yellow Velvet Cake with passion fruit filling is Creola’s version of tiramisu. | Photo by Erik Bernstein
The chef-owner intends to change the menu often to make it hyper-seasonal. She also plans to tap into other of her Top Chef ideas and include more Puerto Rican flavors.
“I traveled to Puerto Rico with my father last year, and when we got off the plane, we went to La Casita Blanca, this great little lunch spot in San Juan,” said Lagomarsini. “The first thing they served as we sat down was plantain soup, and it definitely inspired me. That’ll be on the menu at some point.”
She’s also thinking of a menu that reflects “a celebration of a cookout,” a universal event in Black family culture. Stay tuned for adaptations of recipes for potato salad, mac and cheese, and other traditional foods.
The day-to-day
Now that the excitement of the opening is over and her arm is out of the cast, Lagomarsini is constantly dealing with her running to-do list. There’s ordering food and supplies, deliveries, payroll, logistics, etc. The small space means smaller deliveries, and she tends to sources locally and directly from farms whenever she can. Right now, she’s purchasing essentials like paper towels and toilet paper from Amazon.
To keep her focus on the restaurant itself and conserve her energy, Lagomarsini has learned to delegate. She has an assistant plus Monroe as her publicist, who is in charge of managing communications. Monroe takes care of earned media placements and monitors Creola’s social platforms, although Lagomarsini herself is very involved.
Chef-owner Lana Lagomarsini in front of Creola, the restaurant she envisioned.|Photo by Clay Williams
“Lana has an excellent following and fan base, so we make sure the people in her network feel well informed and are first to get news,” said Monroe. “Creola is really personal to her, so the storytelling is very important, and she’s got a wonderful story to tell. Although we plan to do a little bit of influencer engagement, because the restaurant is so small we are being more thoughtful and mindful of opening the doors for complimentary dinners to everyone.”
Less than a month in, Lagomarsini said she is “very happy” that she took the courageous leap to open a restaurant. There’s not a lot of time for second-guessing or stressing.
“My main goal is getting Creola off the ground and focusing on where I am presently with the restaurant, then moving it forward and getting it where it needs to be,” the chef-owner added. “What’s really most important to me is mastering the space and menus.”
Pat plans and executes menu, food and drink stories for Restaurant Business and hosts the weekly Menu Talk podcast. She provides in-depth coverage of chefs, trends and menu innovation.
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