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‘Experience is the new luxury,’ says We Are Ona founder

BOOKMARK ARTICLE

Luca Pronzato, the founder of We Are Ona, has shaken up the fine dining world through its experience- and gastronomy-driven pop-up restaurants. Having collaborated with designers like Harry Nuriev and Sabine Marcelis to create week-long, full-functioning restaurants all over the world, he believes that pop-up culinary events are mutually beneficial for jumpstarting creativity in the fine dining scene and giving guests experiential souvenirs.

What triggered you to launch We Are Ona? What market and consumer needs were (and are) you answering?

LUCA PRONZATO: I've always worked in the fine dining industry. My last job was as a sommelier for 10 years at Noma in Copenhagen. Having seen the creativity in the kitchen, I wanted to create a more original, innovative setting for the talent to work in. Instead of building one restaurant, where the same patterns that can be detrimental to creativity would continue, we decided to create We Are Ona to let the young talent express their creativity. As a collective of mainly chefs, but also sommeliers, the idea is to create a community around creativity, linking designers, artists, architects and different talents to produce unique experiences culinary experiences around the world. 

Credit: Ilya Kagan.

Luca Pronzato.

We have two main activities, pop-up restaurants and B2B culinary events, where we reimagine the restaurant of the trade event in line with our concept proposing a unique creative direction for each, never repeating ourselves. Each year, we organize around 10 pop-up restaurants and 100 culinary events. We try to reimagine the restaurant as a live exhibition. 

How has the business of fine dining evolved over the past five years? Have you experienced or witnessed shifts? And how is your company responding to those?

I'm a big fan of traditional restaurants so I wouldn’t say We Are Ona is being built in opposition to the established fine dining scene, but more in a complementary way. We are suggesting there is space for new concepts in the scene and we can renew and refresh the scene through each project. What’s been coming out of the the fine dining scene in the last five years has been amazing, but it's true that, for food talent, it's good to have a breadth of experiences and to go out of your comfort zone. I think that doing culinary pop-up events stimulates the creativity of those working in the business. On the contrary, if you only do events, I would also recommend working in restaurants. The combination is how you can build an inspiring journey through a different model of working or expressing yourself. We are pretty singular in doing pop-up restaurants because we take over places that are not restaurants and transform them into restaurants. This is made possible by partnering with amazing designers and creating a different expression of what the restaurant, as we know it, can be. 

Cover and above: Benoit Florençon

A week-long We Are Ona pop-up in Paris, designed by Crosby Studios, melded gourmet cuisine with innovative spatial design, making the hidden corners of the restaurant kitchen visible and redefining traditional dining conventions.

Your experiences are designed to be temporary. What challenges and opportunities come with that? 

It's really inspiring. We travel the world finding spaces that represent the city we are in and we try to capture the time and place throughout the experience. We want guests to feel connected to the restaurant’s greater context. These spaces represent what Paris or New York are to us. We want the space and experience to resonate just as much with locals as it does with visitors and we do that by introducing them to the unfamiliar. For example, the pop-up restaurant we designed with Harry Nuriev was a homage to the dishwashing areas of restaurants. We built a fountain out of sinks, with diners enjoying their meals next to the operating sculptures. It was incredible in terms of creativity. In a short timeframe we can see the restaurant come to life even just for a week.

You’ve recently launched a pop-up in a Harry Nuriev-designed space. And in Milan, there was an event in a space designed by Sabine Marcelis. (How) does spatial design inform your food experience?

The experience isn’t only made of food or service but with the addition of different forms of creativity. Design is extremely important to me. It’s the first thing people see when they come into a restaurant, so it drives the journey we set out to create. We tend to link the food to the design. That’s why working with designers like Harry Nuriev or Sabine Marcelis, who don't typically express themselves in the restaurant scene aligns with our mission. They use their creative range to imagine something new, something different because they aren’t necessarily confined to a predetermined idea about what a restaurant space should be.

Credit: Pauline Shapiro.

Occupying an abandoned building in Lower Manhattan, the We Are Ona pop-up also designed by Harry Nuriev, drew parallels between the interior’s design and the virtual world, one that is, much like the restaurant’s concept, decentralized and in constant flux.

What are your hopes for the future of culinary experiences and fine dining? How will your practice build toward that?

Creating a culinary experience is really something special. And for people, I think experience is the new luxury. It is a great souvenir and so long as it is, it is something we will continue to create for people.

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