A Chef ’s Chef Strikes Out on Her Own
At Lola’s, Suzanne Cupps isn’t interested in trends.
Even among the culinarily inclined, Suzanne “Suzy” Cupps stays under the radar. Mention her to industry folks and they will offer an admiring nod plus the highest praise a chef can muster: “Yeah, she can cook.” She is best known as the executive chef of Danny Meyer’s restaurant at the Whitney and a shortlived sit-down concept from the lunch chain Dig—and she has her fans. To fund her new restaurant, Lola’s (2 W. 28th St., nr. Fifth Ave.; lolasnyc.com), she turned to former regulars. “We raised $1 million in $20,000 increments,” she says. “No one wants to be telling me what to put on the menu. They’re just super-excited to support us.”
Lola is the Tagalog word for “grandmother,” and the name is an homage to Cupps’s own grandmother, who fled the Japanese occupation of the Philippines and from whom Cupps has inherited only a single jade bead and a solitary photograph. Despite the name and the lustrous green of the open kitchen, Lola’s is not, as one might guess, Filipino home cooking: “The name is about honoring a brave, amazing woman who allowed me to be here right now,” Cupps says, “but I don’t cook a ton of Filipino food.”
Cupps grew up in Aiken, South Carolina, and her menu is filled with southern and Pan-asian influences: sesame milk bread with pimento cheese, carrot masala yogurt with naan, a beef-and-barley tartare with gochujang and sunchokes, vaguely adobo-y fried chicken, marinated rib skewers with Carolina BBQ sauce, and a bento box with an ever-changing cargo of seasonal vegetables. The Asian influence, Cupps says, isn’t due to personal biography: “It’s because the first chef I ever worked with was Chinese American, my first souschef was Japanese, my second sous-chef was Taiwanese, and I worked next to a Filipino.”
Lola’s is a bet that it’s still possible to open a modest restaurant in Manhattan without a menu of Tiktok-baiting gimmicks or the backing of a well-financed restaurant “group.” There are just 70 seats because, Cupps explains, “my food doesn’t translate on a large scale.” She is a Greenmarket devotee who brines, roasts, and cures with the intention not of using ingredients but enhancing them. Even pork ribs are brightened with a broth of spring garlic and greens. “I don’t want you leaving here feeling like you need a nap,” she says. ■