About Creola
Creola is named after Chef Lana Lagomarsini's grandmother, whose kitchen first inspired her love of cooking. Creola lived on 88th Street, just across the park from where the restaurant now stands. Sitting at her kitchen table, watching her grandmother cook, was where Lana first understood food as an expression of love and family.
Many of the recipes on Creola's menu come directly from her, taught now by the cousins, aunts, and mother who learned them first. Others draw on Lana's training and travels. All of them lead back to Creola's table.
About Lana
Chef Lana grew up cooking. She left New York for Northeastern, then came back to train at the Culinary Institute of America and spent the next fifteen years in professional kitchens, including Gramercy Tavern and Daniel. She apprenticed with Francis Mallmann on his island in Patagonia. She cooked in Italy and in Colombia. She competed on Bravo's Top Chef: Destination Canada last year, was inducted into Les Dames d'Escoffier in 2023, received a Black Women in Food Award from Dine Diaspora, and joined the James Beard Foundation's Chef Boot Camp for Policy and Advocacy. Her work has been written about in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Cherry Bombe.
Creola is the culmination of all her work. The food on the menu traces the origins of American cooking back to the Black chefs and culinary traditions that shaped it, and back to her grandmother's kitchen on 88th Street.