Episode #77: Sebastian La Rocca

Sebastian La Rocca, who is the Argentina-born chef at the restaurant FYR in my hometown of Columbus, Ohio. It’s a Latin American live fire restaurant that opened inside of a new Hilton Columbus Downtown Hotel right on High Street in the middle of the city in late 2022. I have known Sebastian for years from his work in Costa Rica, where he ran the restaurant at the El Mangroove Hotel in Guanacaste, and then opened up an open fire restaurant called Botanika outside of San José, which was one of New Worlder’s Best New Restaurants when it opened. When he told me he was moving to Columbus I was completely surprised, but I immediately thought that it was one of the smartest decisions any chef I’ve ever met has made. I can tell just from my interactions with him over the past year that he is happier. He went to cook in a city that appreciates what he can do and not to win awards and recognition, though he is getting it anyway. It was a decision to move his family there so they could live a happier life. So many young chefs tell me they want to open in New York or somewhere because it is their dream. Really, that’s your dream as a cook? Shouldn’t it be to make good food that people enjoy and provides you a comfortable life? That can be New York or San Francisco or London or Tokyo, but it doesn’t have to be. You can cook from anywhere. There are cities like Columbus everywhere. Why not open in Trujillo, Peru instead of Lima? Or Manaus instead of Sao Paulo? Every cook I know that’s moved outside the centralized media market, outside of the industry bubble and found their place has been a thousand times happier and they are cooking better food for it. Fyr, Sebastian’s restaurant, has been getting great reviews in local media and he has been bringing a lot of prominent Latin American chefs to Ohio to cook at the restaurant, such as Costa Rica’s Pablo Bonilla and Panama’s Mario Castrellón. It’s kind of weird. These are guys I know from Latin America an have written about a lot that are suddenly in Columbus. It’s kind of two worlds colliding for me.

I grew up here and went to college here. It’s basically all I knew until I was in my 20s. I’ve talked a lot on this podcast about growing up completely disconnected from where the food I ate was coming from. On the episode with Farmer Lee Jones, who runs Chef’s Garden in northern Ohio, I talk about how there weren’t any farms around. There were just corn and soy fields you drove past on the highway. And all of the restaurants were chains and concepts. I started writing about food in Ohio when I was 19, I think, and it wasn’t really until then that I started questioning things. A culinary movement was just beginning there then, with Jeni’s, now a well-known ice cream purveyor, opening in the North Market. There were a handful of fine dining restaurants that were being vocal about supporting local farms, and after I left it just kept kind of evolving. There are really great restaurants there now, both at the high and low end. My old neighborhood is full of Nepalese, Mexican and Salvadoran restaurants, and there has been a lot influence from North Africa and Southeast Asia elsewhere in the city. There are still too many concept restaurants for my taste, but there are more restaurants that are created organically and have creative food with good ingredients and nice drinks to balance it out. It’s a very different place from where I grew up and it’s because of people like Sebastian moving there and bringing new ideas.

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