Perhaps it is Luca Pronzato’s background as a sommelier that makes him so adept at pairings. The 33-year-old founder of We Are Ona, the creative culinary studio he started in 2019, has made a career of combining talents with a chef’s flair for ingredients. He’s collaborated with everyone from artist Carsten Höller to the photographer Mark Borthwick to architect Marc Leschalier, who, for last year’s New York City pop-up at the WSA building on Wall Street, created a set of Brutalist thrones that are still installed outside the venue to this day. “They are the first We Are Ona public sculpture,” Pronzato says with a laugh.
Alexandre de Batek and Luca Pronzato.
Now, he’s returned to WSA for the third and final installment of his partnership with the set designer Alexandre de Batek, following their debut Paris dinner in December 2024, with chef Alexis Bijaoui, and a second iteration that marked the beginning of Hong Kong art week, featuring Mexican chef Elena Reygadas. The multidisciplinary artist and creative mastermind behind some of fashion’s most theatrical runway productions, de Batek has created a 100-foot-long office-inspired lighting installation that seats 104 guests, set with glass plates and cups by Duralex to play up themes of transparency; it will be set to warm or cool-toned light depending on if it’s lunch or dinner service.
«The idea was really to design [the table] like a sculpture,» says de Batek. «It’s a little more radical—radically long, radically skinny. It’s less than two feet wide. You could kiss while you eat.»
Chef Sho Miyashita.
For de Batek, whose studio has produced over 1,500 fashion shows, the collaboration represents something of a new chapter for his creative practice. “I was always a bit of an alien in events,” says de Betak. “They’re ephemeral, but the psychology and the research behind them is deep. Most of what I’ve done was always inside of a much longer story, because the one before is a part of the one after: you take the best of everything. It’s when it’s memorable that [an event] is successful, because when they’re memorable they last.”
Chef Sho Miyashita of Paris’s Haikara Izakaya designed the menu, which will feature caviar, fried chicken and “a lot of smoke,” says Pronzato. “Food is such an incredible medium,” he says. “But it’s not only food. It’s the service, the designs, the ideas. I think there is this kind of layering of details that helps people to feel that they’re being taken care of.”
The crowd is, of course, the most important ingredient in We Are Ona’s unique mix, as key to the experience as the setting. The guest list for this week’s opening dinner will include the photographers Inez and Vinoodh and the fashion designer Maria Cornejo mingling alongside creative director Francesca Sorrenti and the singer Jessie Jo Clark.
The dinner menu will feature caviar and fried chicken.
“People have gotten married after eating with us, they’ve had kids,” says Pronzato. “But what’s most important is that they have fun.”
We Are Ona runs today through May 15th. Tickets are available here.
Sean Santiago is ELLE Decor’s Deputy Editor, covering news, trends and talents in interior design, hospitality and travel, culture, and luxury shopping. Since starting his career at an interior design firm in 2011, he has gone on to cover the industry for Vogue, Architectural Digest, Sight Unseen, PIN-UP and Domino. He is the author of The Lonny Home (Weldon Owens, 2018), has produced scripted social content for brands including West Elm and Streeteasy, and is sometimes recognized on the street for his Instagram Reels series, #DanceToDecor
