Chef Sebastian La Rocca of Fyr, a USA TODAY Restaurant of the Year, talks about his passion
He came to Columbus for the first time just two years ago, but Sebastian La Rocca already has a standard answer to "The Question". If you have friends in supposedly cooler, hipper places, you know the one.
"It’s, ‘What are you doing in Columbus?'" he said. "'Why did you go there?’”
It’s probably a fair question for La Rocca, though. The executive chef for Hilton Columbus Downtown, who leads the culinary teams at Fyr, Stories on High and Spark, was born and raised in Argentina. At 45, he has lived and worked in New York, Miami and London, in Chile, Ecuador, Brazil and Costa Rica.
He has worked with famed Chefs Michel Roux and Jamie Oliver and hosted his own cooking show on Costa Rican TV. He and his restaurants have won numerous awards; he recently was named Argentina’s food and wine ambassador.
Even people here ask him what he’s doing here. So, really, what is he doing here?
“I used to live in New York. I used to live in Miami. Come on,” La Rocca said during an interview at Fyr, his ground-floor, live-fire restaurant that opened in October 2022.
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“Columbus has everything to offer,” he continued. “As a father and a husband, I have everything to offer to my family. It’s moving like a big city, but with a slower speed. You still have time to sit down with someone and talk and get a drink. The Midwest spirit is hospitality.”
Anything else?
“I’m a big fan of the corn. The best corn I tasted was in Costa Rica until I moved here. The corn in Ohio is amazing.”
Ohio ingredients, Argentinian techniques
Corn isn’t the star of the show at Fyr, although it does make seasonal appearances. Fyr’s focus is fire, but not in an ooh, ahh, look-at-those-flames sort of way. Inspired by the traditions and techniques of his home country, where asado is a term for both roasting and the social gatherings where it’s done, La Rocca estimates that 90% of his menu touches fire.
That includes not just beef, lamb, duck, chicken and fish, but also ingredients such as cheese (grilled Argentinian provoleta, served with rosemary honey and toasted almonds); beets (cooked in embers for three hours, peeled and served in a salad with oranges, avocado cream, arugula and cheddar curd) and tomatoes (oven roasted, chilled and served with panela honey, goat cheese and charred onions).
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La Rocca dismisses terms such as farm-to-table as marketing gimmicks, although Fyr does get everything from beef to wood from Ohio farms. The $165 Tomahawk steak from RL Valley Ranch in Athens County is dry-aged for 45 days, cooked on indirect heat for three hours, basted with an herb brush and finished on the grill.
It’s one of those techniques from Argentina, where La Rocca grew up with Sunday dinners in Buenos Aires, sitting around a fire and sharing food with family. He’s the son of an Italian father and Spanish mother who fondly recalls time spent in the kitchen with his grandmother.
“My grandmother was a killer cook,” he said. “Who’s the person most inspiring me in the kitchen? It’s my grandmother. I still say my grandmother. Her flan is on the menu.”
Building a career, reaching a crossroads
He has renowned chefs and prestigious honors on his resume, but it wasn’t until La Rocca had the chance to get back to his roots in 2011 as executive head chef at Oliver’s London restaurant, Barbecoa, that he said he truly began to relax in the kitchen.
“What is food?” he said. “For me, food is culture. Food is a way to express yourself. When you want to know someone, the best way is to ask him to cook for you. You can know about his life, where he’s been, what he appreciates. The food says a lot about a person.”
La Rocca moved to Costa Rica in 2013 and met his wife, Karen. In 2019, he opened his own place, Botanika, in a suburb of San Jose. Botanika was named that year as one of Latin America’s best new restaurants by Columbus-born food writer Nicholas Gill on his New Worlder website.
Another crossroads came after his father’s unexpected death in 2020, when La Rocca realized career success hadn’t translated into personal happiness. He said he was travelling, consulting and spending too much time away from his wife and young daughter, Miranda.
“It helped me to understand: Money will go and come,” he said. “But the quality time you miss with your family won’t come back.”
They visited Columbus during a snowstorm in February 2022 — a “sh** weekend,” as La Rocca recalled — to talk to Hilton representatives about the restaurants planned for the company’s new 28-story hotel in the Short North.
“We loved the city. My wife turned to me and said, ‘I think we can make a home.’”
BJ Lieberman, who moved to Columbus in 2019 from Washington, D.C., and has since opened Chapman's Eat Market, Ginger Rabbit Jazz Lounge and Hiraeth, said he had the same feeling.
"I think it's always a great thing for our city to welcome someone with his skill and background," Lieberman said of La Rocca. "As a fellow transplant to the area, the chef community here is really strong, and I have always felt welcomed."
In a December podcast, Gill said he was surprised at La Rocca's decision to leave Latin America for the Midwest. But he also called it a very smart move.
"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," Gill wrote. "I can tell just from my interactions with him over the past year that he is happier."
Building a restaurant, elevating a city
La Rocca has reached a point in his career where he's confident enough to let ingredients and his preparation do the talking. There's sophistication in simplicity, he has found.
"The more components you put on the plate, it’s much easier to cover a mistake," he said. "You need a lot of skill to put only one or two components on a plate."
He also has arrived at a point in life where he enjoys teaching and mentoring younger people in his field. Christopher Teed, the Columbus Hilton's assistant director of food and beverage, said La Rocca has built a team at Fyr that has proven itself capable of carrying out his vision and the hotel's.
"His ability to deliver on quality of food and flavor, his ability to get that level of performance from his team, is remarkable," Teed said.
The food at Fyr reflects that philosophy. With and through the restaurant, La Rocca wants to raise Columbus’ dining profile, to outsiders and its own residents. He’s complimentary toward other local chefs and restaurants — favorites include Tora in Gahanna and Song Yan in Dublin — and effusive in his praise of local producers such as North Country Charcuterie and Black Radish Creamery.
He started a visiting chef series in 2023 that brought in chefs from Mexico, Costa Rica, Panama, New York and Chicago for one-night-only dinners at Fyr. In December, he hosted a collaborative dinner with fellow Columbus chefs Lieberman, James Anderson of Ray Ray’s Hog Pit, Brett Fife of Lindey’s, and Avishar Barua of Agni and Joya’s.
"I am always grateful to be invited to any party with local chefs," Barua said. "It is humbling to have someone use their philosophy and experience to pool local chefs together. We definitely like building community in Columbus and are always excited to be part of something greater than the sum of our parts."
And that is what Sebastian La Rocca is doing here.
“We want to offer these experiences here that help elevate the palate, the experience," he said. "We come together for the Buckeyes or the Blue Jackets, why not the food?”
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Fyr chef Sebastian La Rocca brings international resume to Columbus
