A new tasting menu restaurant on the Upper East Side, which opened just last month, has been named one of the best new restaurants in Manhattan.
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The restaurant is Creola, from “Top Chef” alum Lana Lagomarsini, at 1261 Park Avenue (between 97th and 98th streets). It’s one of five additions to Eater’s October update of its Manhattan heatmap, which mostly features restaurants that have been open for six months or less, and it’s the only Upper East Side restaurant on the 16-spot list.Lagomarsini, a Bronx native, was a semifinalist on season 22 of “Top Chef,” and her resume includes stints at Gramercy Tavern, Daniel and Momofuku Ko, as we reported when signage went up in August. The restaurant is named after her grandmother, who lived on 88th Street, across the park from where Creola now stands, according to its website. Many of the recipes on the menu come directly from her grandmother, passed down through the cousins, aunts and mother who learned them first.
Creola is a supper club-style tasting menu restaurant with a small dining room that’s open Wednesday through Saturday for two seatings a night. The tasting menu is $125 per person and rotates with the season. An optional $65 wine pairing includes a three-ounce pour of each of the restaurant’s wines by the glass.
The current menu includes head-on shrimp with red-eye gravy, benne bread and shrimp head butter, and a potato pave with bacon fat hollandaise, which diners can top with caviar for an extra $30. Dessert is a banana pudding with spiced molasses cake, white chocolate cremeux and caramelized bananas.
