Fonda, London's colorful new Mexican restaurant: review

“It’s easy to copy something good, but it’s hard to create something good from scratch,” chef Santiago Lastra tells me over dinner in Mexico City, where we are heading a few months before the opening of his new London restaurant Fonda travel. “You can make a technically perfect copy of it.” Mona Lisaand that will be a “good” painting, but standing in front of a blank canvas, creating something original and knowing at the end that you have created something valuable? This is a challenge.’

Lastra has already proven that he is up to this challenge. As a young chef, he left his native Mexico and worked for years in some of the world’s most renowned restaurants, including Mugaritz in Spain and Noma in Copenhagen, before settling in London and opening his own restaurant Kol in 2020. When Lastra ends the goal is to create something original, and that’s exactly what Kol is: a fine-dining restaurant that uses exclusively British ingredients to translate the flavors and techniques of Mexico into genre-bending dishes. When asked if it’s worth it, there’s hardly a more convincing accolade than a Michelin star and 17th place among the world’s 50 best restaurants in just four years.

Fonda, a London restaurant inspired by “delicious” Mexico

(Image credit: Courtesy of Fonda)

But with Fonda, Lastra and his team are doing something different – they’re taking up the traditional Fonda – a small, family-run restaurant, typically in a converted garage – and transforms it into a fine dining experience suitable for a London audience. Like Kol, the menu impresses with its innovative take on Mexican cuisine, but is more casual and approachable than its predecessor. Standout dishes include a roasted pumpkin seed mole and rectangular totopos that might be the best chips and dip you’ve ever tasted. and the Baja tacos with beer-battered Cornish cod and Lastra’s own take on guacamole made with pistachios and cucumber instead of avocado.

Completely in the spirit of the traditional Fonda Boiling, corn and a Comal machine for making tacos and tostadas are the driving force behind the menu. The corn used to make the tortillas is sourced in collaboration with Tamoa, a social enterprise founded by husband-and-wife team Francisco Musi and Sofia Caserin that connects local Mexican corn farmers with restaurants here and abroad to maintain demand for endangered corn species. For Fonda, that means not only supporting communities that grow diverse ancient crops, but also using the highest quality corn as the base for each dish, with a far more complex flavor profile than your standard yellow corn on the cob.

For the interiors, Lastra collaborated with Alessio Nardi of A_nrd Design Studio to create a space with the vibrancy and welcoming, relaxed atmosphere of a traditional Fonda, but translated into a modern code. Each table has a sala stand, a standard feature of any fonda, although it is made of black stone and filled with three specialty salsas. The tequila and wine bottles, all from Fonda’s own brand, are decorated with labels inspired by the graphics of Mexico City’s subway system.

Mexico City-based designer Fernando Laposse was instrumental in designing the space, having designed several custom pieces for the restaurant and introducing the team to other Mexican designers who contributed. Laposse is best known for transforming natural materials like loofahs and corn leaves into inspired design objects, and for Fonda he created three patchwork panels dyed with pigments from crushed cochineal insects and marigolds. In a way, the piece, with its interplay of different colors and gentle movements in space, is a replacement for the paper party flags found in traditional fondas, but reinterpreted in a contemporary design context. Laposse also designed “Wild Beast” for the space, a bright pink sloth whose shaggy fur is woven from agave fibers using traditional Oaxacan techniques.

Other notable design features include the work of MA Estudio, whose founder, Melissa Avila, collaborates with local artisans throughout Mexico to create her pieces. All of the craftsmen and women Avila works with still use traditional techniques to create their designs. By creating a new market for her work, Avila hopes to help preserve traditional craftsmanship throughout Mexico and create a sustainable income opportunity for the artisans.

“Every restaurant is an ecosystem,” Lastra says a day before Fonda’s official opening, and what he did in this case undoubtedly proves that to be true. The food, the atmosphere, the service, the interior designers and the suppliers all work towards one central goal – to celebrate Mexico as it truly is, a place that is, in Lastra’s words, “delicious and full of people who love it love to eat something”. a good time and full of color.