- Written by: Chefluencer Editorial Team
On Sunday, 26 October, KOL will do what it does best: rewrite the script. For one night only, Santiago Lastra is clearing out the tables of his Michelin-starred dining room and inviting four of the world’s most celebrated chefs to London. The brief is deceptively simple. The subject is sacred. The format is tacos.
In a move that feels closer to a culinary summit than a birthday party, Lastra will host Thomas Frebel (Noma Projects, Copenhagen), Rodolfo Guzmán (Boragó, Santiago), Nicolai Nørregaard (Kadeau, Copenhagen) and Ana Roš (Hiša Franko, Kobarid) for a one-off feast. Each chef will create their own interpretation of Mexico’s most iconic dish, layering their personal philosophy onto the taco’s universal geometry of masa, filling and heat. Lastra will complete the line-up with a taco that distils five years of KOL’s evolution: Mexican soul built on British soil.
The restaurant floor will become an arena. Guests will move between five chef-stations, tasting, talking, and watching. No set menu. No polite procession of courses. Just a roomful of sharp minds and bold ideas, folded into tortillas. Afterwards, the celebration descends into the Mezcaleria - KOL’s subterranean ode to agave - for cocktails, tequilas, mezcals and antojitos.
A Five-Year Ascent
The significance of this night isn’t just the guest list. It’s what it represents.
Santiago Lastra has spent the last decade redefining how Mexican cuisine travels. Born in Cuernavaca in 1990, he cooked his way from a teenage kitchen in central Mexico to the Basque Culinary Center, Mugaritz, and finally the pivotal role of organising Noma’s 2017 Mexico pop-up. It was there he realised that authenticity isn’t about importing ingredients wholesale; it’s about translating flavour through place.
When Lastra opened KOL in October 2020, he bet everything on that idea. He used sea buckthorn in place of lime, British herbs where others would use hoja santa, and wild seaweed instead of cactus. Corn, chocolate and chiles remained sacred imports. Everything else came from British land and sea.
Critics were sceptical. Diners were curious. Five years later, KOL has a Michelin star, a Mezcaleria packed nightly, and a seat at the global table: #49 on The World’s 50 Best Restaurants. It is the first Mexican restaurant in London to achieve this kind of cultural gravity.
Why not to miss this anniversary?
Each of the invited guests brings a different culinary language - Nordic, Chilean, Slovenian, Mexican-British - and each will bend the taco to their will. Tacos are often reduced to street-food shorthand. Here, they become a shared language between five of the most original minds working today. It’s about technique meeting memory, terroir meeting migration, play meeting precision. And for Lastra, it’s a way of showing just how far KOL has travelled - from pandemic opening to global stage - without losing its sense of mischief.
This will be the taco party London will talk about long after the mezcal runs out.
KOL’s 5th Anniversary Taco Celebration
KOL, 9 Seymour Street, Marylebone, London W1H 7BA
Sunday 26 October 2025
Two seatings: 6–8pm and 8–10pm
£110 per person (incl. 1 drink + 5 tacos)
Tickets via KOL newsletter from 5 October, 4PM
kolrestaurant.com