The chef/owner of the UK’s top-ranked restaurant, Kol, goes casual with RM45 Baha fish tacos 

TORTILLA chips have come a long way in London over the last few years. 

A decade ago, you would have had to look hard to find decent ones at a restaurant. There are trails across the city at places like Los Mochis, el Pastor and Hachas bar. 

The latest, best option is a plate-sized, crispy, nutty-fried corn tortilla, perched on top of a pair of massive Scottish scallops at Fonda. The restaurant, set on a corner of the destination food alley of Heddon Street, across from the sparkling new Ambassadors Clubhouse, is the highly anticipated new spot from the UK’s most famous Mexican chef, Santiago Lastra. 

Lastra is renowned not for tortilla chips, but for his groundbreaking, Michelin-starred tasting menu spot, Kol, in Marylebone — the UK’s highest-ranked dining spot according to World’s 50 Best, where the 13-course menu for £185 (RM1038). He’s also known as the guy who refuses to import signature Mexican ingredients from avocados to limes and mangoes, insisting they would lose something in the journey. Guacamole, when he served it at Kol, was fashioned from pistachio nuts. 

Lastra gave Bloomberg Pursuits an early preview of Fonda a few days before its official opening on Oct 17. We ran over, eager to see if, among other things, he would bring back guacamole to accompany his transcendent tortilla chips. 

Lastra and Pancho (above), who is sure to be a TikTok star

In Mexico, a fonda is a small, family-owned restaurant, the kind of place set up under an open garage door serving the classics. The defining piece of equipment is a comal, a super-sized griddle made from cast iron or clay for searing staples like tortillas, meat and quesadillas. “It’s often operated by a grandma or mom and it usually doesn’t have a name,” said Lastra. “You’ll say to your friends, let’s go to blue fonda.” The model seems like a stretch for Lastra, a precise chef who worked with Rene Redzepi in his 2017 Noma Tulum residency. But he’s a highly engaged, pleasant guy, who geeks out on minute details. “In Mexico, I spend my holidays watching guys cooking in markets,” he laughed. 

Like such local places in Mexico, pride of place in Fonda’s kitchen goes to two comals, one clay and one cast iron, mounted on a clunky terracotta ledge that exudes strong Mayan vibes. Lastra said that the clay comal, which he specifically uses for tortillas because of the subtle flavour it imparts, is imported from Oaxaca; it is, he claims one of the only ones you’ll find outside of Mexico. 

The restaurant, which has 80 seats upstairs and will have 30 more when they open the downstairs “sala rosa” space later this year, feels tropical with plenty of large plants and colourful Latin American wall hangings, against varying shades of brown and ochre. But the decor that animates the room is a monster-sized pink sloth suspended over the stairs. Lastra has named it Pancho and you can’t leave the restaurant without having your picture taken underneath it.

One thing you won’t find at a fonda is the kind of unlimited bowls of chips stapled at casual Mexican places in the US. There’s a dish on the a la carte menu that features them: Sikil pak, a thick Yucatan dip made with pumpkin seeds and pine oil, served with precise rectangular tortilla crisps £9. The chips, aka totopos, are glorious — they’re made with heirloom corn that Lastra imports from Mexico, which is milled every day and then fashioned into tortillas by hand before they’re fried shatteringly crisp. They have a terrific, toasted corn nuttiness.

Each table gets a little stand of dips, crafted by a UK iron-monger and meant to act as a centrepiece. During the day, it’s topped with a plant and at night, by a candle. It holds three salsas: A beige sunflower seed condiment with oil and a little honey; a green tangy one that Lastra bases on courgettes/zucchini (he’s not importing tomatillos); and a spicy red arbol chilli-based one. 

A very precise, £8 Baha fish taco is made with beer-battered cod and has a secret ingredient in the very crunchy coating: Marmite, which you can taste if you concentrate. The very British spread gives the batter a hit of funky umami flavour. But Lastra is adamant about not shouting out such products on the menu: “You should just eat it. Then order another one if you like it.” 

Fonda’s mole poblano which is slow cooked with tender short rib

Another dish he serves hot off the comal is a Costra taco, a Mexico City speciality featuring a chunk of aged rib eye, cooked in melted cheese until it’s tantalisingly crusty on a slightly flabby wheat tortilla. (Corn tortillas dominate their flour counterparts here.) 

There are a couple of marquee dishes at Fonda. One is carnitas, a generous serving of shredded pork neck and shoulder confit, decorated with squares of super crisp chicharron (£25). It’s presented in a two-part container; the top half holds a sleeve of warm hand-pressed corn tortillas; and it’s especially good with the nut salsa. 

And then there’s the duo de callo, that scallop dish that features two silky XL scallops, dressed with sesame and orange, with a strong kick of habanero heat. The best thing about it isn’t the pricey molluscs, it’s that massive fried tortilla — what Lastra ingeniously calls a corn chicharron, to be whacked with a knife into smaller pieces. It’s reminiscent of a dish at the popular Mexican cafe Atla in New York and it goes a long way to enhancing the inherently fun energy at Fonda. (Let’s note that fun isn’t necessarily cheap; the scallop dish is £39.) 

The compact list of desserts includes Lastra’s original signature dish: Santiago’s cheesecake. It’s a recipe he perfected as a teenager and sold for US$1 (RM4.30) a slice to teachers, who, he says, fought over it. (You would, too; it’s outrageously creamy and smooth, with a shower of chilli-enhanced black currants on top.) 

The drinks at Fonda are dominated by tequila. There’s a section devoted to palomas, including one topped with Champagne; a next-level Michelada made with lacto-fermented tomato juice and a house margarita. The wine list is focused on bottles from small producers and cold climate regions. 

In Mexico, noted Lastra, people might go to a Fonda every day and he’s working hard to recreate that ethos here. He applauds the Mexican food coming out of New York City. “They made it fun, the music, the energy,” he said and he wants to do that here. Even at a tasting without music — or almost any imported ingredients, not to mention guacamole — you could feel it’s a place that you would be going back to. Maybe not every day, but soon. — Bloomberg

• This article first appeared in The Malaysian Reserve weekly print edition