We Are Ona are hosting the hottest dinner parties in town. And everyone’s invited

It’s a Friday night in March during Paris Fashion Week and 33-year-old Luca Pronzato is surveying the scene of his latest ephemeral restaurant: a tented, 100-seat dining room in the Jardin des Tuileries that is an extension of the city’s buzzy new design fair Matter and Shape. Pronzato is the mastermind behind the Parisian culinary pop-up We Are Ona (ona means wave in Catalan, his mother’s native tongue), and tonight is its 33rd iteration. 

It took 36 hours for Pronzato’s team to set everything up: from the kitchen that will churn out six- and eight-course meals for about 700 covers over four days to the striking, cinematic front-of-house. One of We Are Ona’s regular collaborators, Willo Perron – the LA-based creative director who has staged shows for Beyoncé and Drake – designed the dining space. It’s a spectacle of five large round white tablecloth-laid tables encircled by 24 oval-shaped mirrors with high-gloss white frames (designed by Perron for NO GA, the Swedish gallery and furniture brand).

As  dinner is served, waiting staff appear in a choreographed procession, pushing plates on chrome serving trolleys. The light winks and bounces off the reflective surfaces, silverware and glassware to scintillating effect. There’s an element of performance, which is heightened further when the highly conceptual, tasty dishes, composed by London-based chef and food stylist Imogen Kwok, are placed in front of guests. “We like to create these moments during those crazy, creative weeks such as Salone [Milan Design Week] or Fashion Week, when the city is on fire but you can escape into this bubble – an atmosphere that inspires conversation,” Pronzato says of the otherworldly ambience he conjures. 

Dan Thawley, the artistic director of Matter and Shape, is partnering with Pronzato for the second year in a row. “There is a sense of mystery and magic that they bring to dining that is constantly surprising, sometimes challenging, but always inspiring,” he says. He is an Ona regular. “I have so many memories, including a dinner inside a neon-lit Parisian warehouse, and even Casanova’s former bedroom in a Venetian palazzo with tables snaking beneath frescoes and passementerie.”

The opening night at Matter and Shape draws a crowd that includes Interview magazine’s Mel Ottenberg, HTSI columnist Laila Gohar, luxury retail doyenne Sarah Andelman and, allegedly, one half of Daft Punk. Another guest, the magician David Blaine, is out of his seat most of the evening, regaling guests with his tricks. But it’s the feast conceived by Kwok – who is known for imagining highly original and sculptural spreads and trompe-l’oeil dishes – that is the most exciting presence. Her food riffs on familiar classics such as tuna carpaccio (served with wedges of tomato), fresh wontons and her signature “egg” dish: steamed rice, packed and concealed in a whole eggshell that she invites guests to roll and crack on the table, and then season with lashings of soy sauce butter and toasted sesame. “There are playful elements throughout the menu, and courses where the diners get involved. I like them to use their hands, to interact with the food, as it’s a key part of my cooking style,” Kwok says of her approach.

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Paris-born Pronzato was destined for the kitchen: his Italian father and Catalan mother have run an Italian grocery in the city for the past 42 years. He and his sister would spend their school holidays visiting producers and winemakers in Italy with their parents. And after high school, he enrolled in a wine-management course to get experience in wineries. 

He arrived at Noma in Copenhagen in 2015, where he spent three years working front-of-house: it seeded his business idea for We Are Ona, which he founded in 2019. “[At Noma] we were a team of 100 people with around 45 nationalities and everybody had their own skill, their own identity,” he says. “Most restaurants are vertical, though, and my idea was to create a community of talent from all over the world – to explore food as a great creative medium and expression of culture.”

We Are Ona experiences have since become a fixture in an international calendar that takes in art, fashion and design, and has travelled from Mexico City to Paris, Basel, Venice and New York. The events run as five- to seven-day pop-up gastronomical experiences and are open to the public. They comprise a degustation by a chef, often a young ascendant or freshly Michelin-starred talent, such as the Paris-based Mory Sacko transplanted to New York, for example, or the Mexican chef Elena Reygadas, who in March went to Hong Kong to cook in a space designed by French events director and designer Alexandre de Betak. Last year, for Art Basel in Paris, Pronzato brought German artist Carsten Höller’s culinary concept, the Brutalist Kitchen Manifesto (minimalist one-ingredient dishes served from his restaurant Brutalisten in Stockholm), to a cavernous, disused warehouse within Gare Montparnasse. “It was incredible. Everything was black and white – the only thing in colour was the food or the drink,” says Pronzato.

The Paris-based food journalist Lindsey Tramuta, author of the latest The Eater Guide to Paris, recalls another event designed by the Moscow-based architectural design studio Crosby Studios – an ode to the work done back-of-house in restaurants. For it, they served refined Thai dishes by Berlin-based chef Dalad Kambhu on plates printed with food smears to look like dirty dishes. And they cobbled together 19 stainless-steel sinks to create a working fountain as a table centrepiece. “It felt like a cheeky middle finger to the over-polished world of haute cuisine,” says Tramuta, “especially given Dalad Kambhu’s high-level Thai cooking – that, I should add, is completely unfamiliar to Parisians. It all worked because both the chef and Crosby Studios are outsiders – not French, so disruptive in their ideas and unafraid to execute them in a city that has long been resistant to change.”

In a city with 129 Michelin-starred addresses, it can be hard to make an impact. For We Are Ona, novelty pays off. The most essential ingredients are unbeatable, ordinarily inaccessible locations, a limited timeline that creates a sense of immediacy, the energy of the people involved and, of course, cuisine that intrigues. “Fine dining is great, but it’s not only happening in one type of restaurant any more – it’s not what it used to be,” says Pronzato. “For me, it’s the added details. It’s not just the food, service and atmosphere, but the journey and the feeling of collaboration that brings a certain energy. We want to create something different – to create memories.”