A 14-seat supper club serving oxtail pâté en croûte and potlikker consommé has quietly opened on Park Avenue, tucked into a 300-square-foot storefront near the border of Carnegie Hill and East Harlem. Creola, which debuted Wednesday, is the brainchild of chef Lana Lagomarsini, a Top Chef semifinalist who designed the space herself and built the menu around her grandmother's recipes and her years working in some of New York's most demanding kitchens.
According to WhatNow, Lagomarsini opened the restaurant at 1261 Park Avenue on Wednesday, offering a supper club-style tasting menu that explores African American, Caribbean, Southern, and broader Black culinary traditions. The chef previously worked at Momofuku Ko, Gramercy Tavern, Blue Hill at Stone Barns, and Daniel, and she trained in Patagonia under chef Francis Mallmann, per the same report. Creola is named for her grandmother, whose recipes and cooking lessons shaped the menu, and Lagomarsini envisioned the restaurant as an intimate supper club rather than a traditional fine-dining room.
Lagomarsini's connection to the Upper East Side runs deeper than the address. In 2015, while working at Gramercy Tavern, she moved in with her grandmother Creola on East 88th Street, an experience that deepened her tie to the family recipes now anchoring the restaurant's menu, according to Eater New York. The restaurant sits just a short distance from that address, at 1261 Park Avenue between East 97th and East 98th Streets, a spot that previously housed O Cuisine, a female-owned private dining and culinary studio run by chef Anne Margaret O'Hare, according to East Side Feed. According to Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal, Community District 8—which encompasses the Upper East Side, including Yorkville, Carnegie Hill and Lenox Hill, as well as Roosevelt Island—is home to several large cultural institutions.
From Pop-Up Circuit to a Permanent Storefront
Before opening Creola, Lagomarsini ran pop-up dining events for roughly six years, a run that ended in a decision late last year to find a permanent home rather than keep hauling equipment and ingredients across the city, WhatNow reports. The chef described the constant transport between temporary venues as “the schlep,” per the outlet's account, and that logistical strain pushed her toward the brick-and-mortar model she now runs on Park Avenue.
The five-table, 14-seat restaurant occupies its 300-square-foot space with a design Lagomarsini created herself, using gold, bronze, and blue tones throughout the room. Creola operates on a tight schedule, open Wednesday through Saturday from 5 p.m. to 11 p.m., with two nightly seatings that cap the restaurant's total weekly capacity at under 120 guests, according to Marina Bernshtein. That scale puts Creola closer to a private supper club than a conventional high-volume restaurant.
A Menu Built on Diaspora and Grandmother's Recipes
The tasting menu runs $125 per person, with an optional $65 wine pairing, according to Eater New York. Dishes include oxtail pâté en croûte made with oxtail, plantain, and turmeric and inspired by a Jamaican beef patty, alongside quail, crudos, scallops with beurre blanc, and a peanut soup with pickled shrimp and suya oil. A potlikker consommé draws directly from Lagomarsini's grandmother's collard greens recipe, while dessert options include passionfruit tiramisu and a goose egg pavlova with sorrel-poached berries and rhubarb.
Preview dishes shown off in August featured gamey elk paired with a dark blackberry jerk sauce, along with lamb served with tamarind barbecue sauce and Southern-style chow chow, according to East Side Feed. The menu leans heavily on ingredients like tamarind, plantains, and Southern condiments meant to represent the broader African diaspora, per Dine Diaspora's coverage of the chef's culinary philosophy.
A Chef Who Rejects the Word 'Elevated'
Lagomarsini has been explicit about avoiding the word “elevated” when describing Black heritage food, according to Dishin' Up Diaspora, framing her cooking instead around honoring diasporic histories and ancestral traditions through modern technique. Many Black chefs reject that framing, the outlet notes, because it implies traditional heritage cooking is inherently lesser until refined by Western fine-dining standards.
Lagomarsini's television résumé extends beyond Creola's opening. She competed on Season 22 of Bravo's Top Chef, titled Destination Canada, according to Marina Bernshtein. Before that, she competed on the first season of Netflix's Pressure Cooker, a competition that debuted in 2023 and in which contestants lived together and judged each other's dishes, per Wikipedia; the season had eight episodes.
From Journalism Degree to Culinary Institute
Lagomarsini earned a bachelor's degree in journalism from Northeastern University before pivoting to food media and eventually enrolling at the Culinary Institute of America, according to the James Beard Foundation. She grew up in the Bronx and worked in Boston-area restaurant kitchens during college before committing fully to culinary school. In 2023, she was inducted into Les Dames d'Escoffier International, and she was later named a 2024 Black Women in Food honoree by Dine Diaspora, an organization that recognizes Black women globally across culinary arts, advocacy, and hospitality.
Creola's opening follows Lagomarsini's turn as a guest chef in a live-fire summer pop-up series on Governors Island earlier this year, a stint Hoodline covered in its report on Theodora's beach club debut. With only 14 seats and four service nights a week, Creola now joins a wave of fine-dining alumni translating television visibility and pop-up experience into small, tightly controlled storefronts, a model WhatNow frames as a growing trend among chefs seeking creative independence without corporate backing.
