Santiago Lastra Brings KOL to Tate Modern for a Frida Kahlo Tie-In
A dining room in Tate Modern’s lower levels is now carrying as much curatorial intent as the exhibition above it. This month, Mexican chef Santiago Lastra, 36, is running a pop-up at the museum to coincide with Frida: The Making of An Icon, extending the conversation around Frida Kahlo into the language of food, sourcing, and design.
Lastra opened KOL in Marylebone, London, in 2020. The restaurant earned its first Michelin star in 2022 and is now listed among the world’s top 50 restaurants. At Tate, he is serving seasonal local ingredients shaped by the bright, smoky register of Mexican cooking — coconut, lime, chilli, and charring — in plates that aim for precision rather than spectacle.
This is not Lastra’s first turn at Tate Modern. In 2017, while he was still building his international profile, he staged a three-day pop-up at the museum that proved a success. He says that experience helped clarify a larger ambition: to use local ingredients while remaining rooted in Mexico, and to present Mexican cuisine on its own terms rather than through the flattening lens of Tex-Mex.
That idea has guided much of his career. Lastra has described his work as part of a broader movement among creative Mexicans, alongside figures such as filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu and designer Fernando Laposse. For him, food is not simply a craft but a cultural language — one that can carry identity across borders with unusual force.
The Frida Kahlo connection is personal as well as thematic. Lastra was born in Coyoacán, the same district of Mexico City where Kahlo lived. He has also spoken about how loss shaped his own creative path: at 14, he lost his father and grandparents within a month. Kahlo’s life, marked by illness, accident, and a fiercely self-defined Mexican identity, offered him a model of artistic resilience.
A decisive chapter came when René Redzepi invited him to help project-manage a Noma pop-up in Tulum. Lastra traveled widely across Mexico, speaking with local and Indigenous growers, observing traditional cooks, and studying markets and suppliers. He spent two months in the Yucatán jungle working with 18 Indigenous villages, an experience he says taught him more about Mexico than the rest of his life combined.
That research now informs the ecosystem around KOL, from farmers and foragers to potters, fishermen, artisans, designers, and architects. The restaurant’s downstairs Mezcaleria highlights small specialist producers, while the dining room, designed by Hackney-based studio A-nrd, uses yellow, pink, and burnt orange, with a large-scale corn-husk panel by Fernando Laposse as its only wall work.
For Lastra, the point is not simply to serve refined food in an art museum. It is to show how gastronomy can function as cultural argument — and how a restaurant, at its best, can become a form of public expression.
