Few understand the possibilities of fine dining better than Luca Pronzato, the former sommelier and Noma alum who is revolutionizing the gastronomy world with his nomadic culinary studio, We Are Ona. Since 2019, the 33-year-old Parisian entrepreneur has been staging pop-up restaurants around the world, featuring renowned chefs—from Instagram personality Pierce Abernathy to L’Arpège’s Alexis Bijaoui—in striking spaces designed by leading artists such as Alexandre de Betak and Cristina Celestino.
Now, Pronzato is bringing We Are Ona back to his native city in time for Paris Fashion Week. A pop-up located in the middle of the historic Jardin des Tuileries will serve as the centerpiece for the buzzy design fair Matter and Shape. Pronzato enlisted French-Canadian artist Willo Perron to design the restaurant’s space, transforming the industrial setting with low-hanging lights, sleek mirrored panels, and tables arranged in a spiral pattern.
The chef Imogen Kwok will collaborate with Pronzato on the menu, with each course served as a staged performance.
The Paris pop-up marks a full-circle moment for Pronzato. His Italian father and Spanish mother own Le Mille Pâtes, a deli just a few blocks from the Tuileries.
“My childhood was spent visiting producers in Italy with my parents,” he says, recounting trips to vineyards and truffle farms. By the time Pronzato was 14, he was working front-of-house jobs at restaurants across Paris after school and on the weekends.
As a university student at Sorbonne, in 2009, Pronzato became fast friends with Guillaume Selosse—a descendant of the renowned Champagne wine-making family—who introduced him to viniculture and helped him find his footing in the industry. “I think life is made up of these encounters,” he says. “If I hadn’t met Guillaume, who knows what would have happened?”
Pronzato spent the next 10 years learning everything he could about wine, interning at Champagne Jacques Selosse between university graduation and starting a job as the sommelier at Chez Casimir, a French bistro in Paris’s 10th Arrondissement.
Then, in 2016, he got his dream job at René Redzepi’s three-Michelin-starred restaurant, Noma, in Copenhagen. “There’s definitely a ‘before and after Noma’ in my life,” says Pronzato.
Noma introduced him to some of the top chefs and also highlighted a problem in the world of fine dining: many talented cooks spent years, even decades, in the shadows of bigger-name figures. We Are Ona, Catalan for “wave,” was born as a way to give that younger talent a spotlight without separating them from their mentors.
“I wanted to build a community of young talents—not just in food but in design and architecture,” he says.
We Are Ona has taken Pronzato around the world—from early installations in Lisbon and the Turkish coastal town of Kaplankaya to his notorious 2023 Parisian collaboration with Crosby Studios’ Harry Nuriev, who created an entire dining space from steel sinks as an ode to restaurants’ back-of-house.
But, as always, when the pop-up was over, and before the last sink was taken down, Pronzato was already on to the next.
This time around, We Are Ona will exist for only four days in the Jardin des Tuileries. Then Pronzato is off to Hong Kong, where he’ll feature the Mexico City–based chef behind Rosetta, Elena Reygadas, in a pop-up timed to Art Basel.
“That’s the most important thing for me,” Pronzato says. “To be able to invite artists and chefs and say, you know, run wild: Now it’s time for you to express yourself.”
We Are Ona’s Paris pop-up is on now until March 10, followed by a Hong Kong pop-up from March 28 to 30
Elena Clavarino is a Senior Editor at Air Mail
