Lana Lagomarsini is a born-and-raised New Yorker who explores culinary traditions from across the Black diaspora at Creola, her five-course tasting menu restaurant on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
Lagomarsini learned to cook from her grandmother while growing up in the Bronx. She studied journalism at Northeastern University before attending the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York. She worked at Gramercy Tavern, Daniel, and Momofuku Ko and apprenticed with Argentine chef Francis Mallmann on his island in Patagonia.
When restaurants shuttered during the COVID-19 pandemic, she launched Lana Cooks, a private chef business, and went on to host supper clubs and pop-ups.
She joined Les Dames d’Escoffier International in 2023. In 2024, Dine Diaspora’s Black Women in Food Awards recognized her in the Culinarians category. That summer, she participated in the James Beard Foundation’s Chef Bootcamp for Policy and Change. In 2025, she reached the semifinals of Top Chef: Destination Canada, the show’s 22nd season.
Her supper clubs helped shape Creola, the laid-back tasting menu restaurant she opened in September 2026 and named after her grandmother. The changing menu draws on Southern cooking and other traditions across the Black diaspora, including a riff on Jamaican beef patties.
“My background is in journalism, so I’m really interested in researching a lot of what I do. That’s how that started,” she says. “Once I started watching documentaries and doing research, it was a snowball effect as far as my interest in learning more about not only the foodways, but where food comes from and our greater story as Americans.”
