Santiago Lastra’s debut cookbook, Mexican Soul: A New Style of Cooking, isn’t quite what some might expect. It is not a manual for recreating dishes from his landmark London restaurant KOL, which holds a Michelin star and is one of only two UK restaurants on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list. One suspects that book is still to come.
Instead, Mexican Soul applies the philosophy behind KOL to simpler, more accessible dishes. Its central argument is that Mexican cooking is defined less by a fixed list of ingredients than by an understanding of flavour, technique and balance. Specialist produce can be useful, but it is not essential.
The book begins by introducing traditional ingredients and recipes, organising the foundations of Mexican cooking around six elements: sour, sweet, spicy, fat, smoky and masa (the corn ‘dough’ used to make tortillas and tamales). It then applies these principles more freely across around 80 recipes, including pistachio guacamole, tortillas made using mashed potato, mushroom al pastor and a salsa verde involving apple and gooseberry. An extensive substitution guide helps readers identify locally available alternatives to Mexican ingredients.
There is also a fun mini-section on the unwritten rules of Mexican cooking. These include that raw fish belongs on a tostada rather than in a taco; that there is always a mum somewhere who cooks a recipe better than you; and that a taco should be eaten in two or three bites - something regularly flouted by Mexican restaurants in the UK.
In its opening pages, the book also recounts Lastra’s rather more interesting than usual journey to becoming one of the world’s most famous Mexican chefs. Born in Mexico City and raised in Cuernavaca, Lastra began working in restaurant kitchens at 15 before leaving Mexico to build an international career that included time at Mugaritz in San Sebastián and Copenhagen’s Nordic Food Lab.
His breakthrough came in 2017, when he worked with René Redzepi as project manager for Noma’s Mexico residency, travelling to source ingredients and develop relationships with local producers. He subsequently staged dinners and residencies around the world, including at London’s Carousel, before opening KOL with MJMK Restaurants in Marylebone in 2020. In 2024, he followed it with the more casual Fonda in Mayfair, which draws on the food of Mexico’s family-run restaurants, markets and homes.
Mexican Soul is closely connected to KOL, but takes the restaurant’s intellectual framework and attempts to make it practical, generous and repeatable. In taking this approach, Lastra is one of a growing number of chefs seeking to separate authenticity from strict replication. Mexican cooking, he suggests, can travel successfully because its soul resides in how ingredients are treated and combined, not merely in where they were grown.
Book review: Mexican Soul: A New Style of Cooking
Number of pages: 272
Must try recipe: Cochinita salbutes
Publisher and price: Quadrille, £30