You’re reading the Food Scene newsletter, Helen Rosner’s guide to what, where, and how to eat. Sign up to receive it in your inbox.Creola, a restaurant that opened last month, on the upper edge of the Upper East Side, bills itself as a supper club. There’s no membership, no subscription, no door policy—you get in by booking your dinner on OpenTable, just like everyone else—but, in a clubbish sort of way, it rewards repeat visits. Dinner at Creola is a set-menu affair, a half-dozen courses developed and cooked by the chef-owner, Lana Lagomarsini. Every month or so, she’ll change up the menu entirely, top to tail. The restaurant is bedroom-size, with five tables puzzle-fit into a narrow dining room; Lagomarsini cooks in a closet-size kitchen at the back. The space is warm and lo-fi—Polaroids of friends and a handwritten lineup of the day’s specials (which can be added at a supplementary cost) are stuck to a noticeboard—but the food is sharp and assured. Lagomarsini’s formidable résumé includes stints at Daniel and Momofuku Ko, and time in South America working with the Argentinean chef Francis Mallmann; she competed on a recent season of “Top Chef” and reached the semifinal. At Creola, she puts her French-informed technique to work exploring Black American foodways, with creations such as a Jamaican-patty-spiced pâté en croûte whose center inlay isn’t a traditional hard-boiled egg but a sunny yellow plantain.The restaurant is named for Lagomarsini’s grandmother, who was born in a small town outside Mobile, Alabama, and moved to New York City when Lagomarsini’s mother was a child. (Creola is, slightly confusingly, not a Creole restaurant—“I’m O.K. with the confusion,” Lagomarsini told me, “because it lets me talk about my grandma more.”) Lagomarsini, who was raised in the Bronx, learned to cook Southern food in her grandmother’s Upper West Side home, not far from what would become the restaurant that bears her name. Before opening Creola, Lagomarsini oversaw a string of pop-ups, including a recent dinner series inspired by the Club from Nowhere, the civil-rights activist Georgia Gilmore’s kitchen network, which fed and funded the Montgomery bus boycott.Creola’s début menu included an elk chop dusted with blackberry jerk seasoning, a pot-likker consommé, panisses—fried batons of chickpea flour—with collard-green aioli. By the time I visited, she had switched to a menu inspired by summer cookouts from her childhood. Despite the rusticity of the theme, the dishes were equally refined: An opening course of “snacks” included oysters in a tasso-ham mignonette, tender oxtail croquettes, and petite cheese-dream sandwiches, a Southern precursor to the modern grilled cheese, slicked with tomato jam. Succotash was reimagined as a chilled corn soup, velvet-rich and studded with sweet-corn kernels and little pieces of multicolored tomatoes. The surface held a swirl of basil oil and a tangle of fried okra slivers. An austere presentation of potato pavé—plated next to precise quanta of crisp lardons, gooey caramelized onions, and shaved celery, plus a dollop of canary-yellow hollandaise made with bacon fat—was a riff on potato salad, and just as much fun to eat bit by bit as it was to mush the elements together into a single bite. There was an option to add a swoop of osetra caviar, but I don’t think the dish—earthy, salty, dense—needed the boost.At a less personal restaurant, this kind of food—deconstructed, fussified, Frenchified—might make me roll my eyes. But it works here, in part because of the creative promise of the supper-club conceit. Plenty of restaurants change their menus seasonally, but this sort of regular, soup-to-nuts overhaul is rare, especially for a restaurant as tiny as Creola, with its shoestring staff—it’s just Lagomarsini, a sous-chef, a dishwasher, and a front-of-house person who is host, server, and busser all in one. Is it a bonkers way to run a business? Maybe. With such a volume of ever-new dishes, will there be a few misses among the hits? Inevitably. (That pâté en croûte, gorgeous as it looked, was dry and a tad bland.) But it also makes the restaurant feel like a project worth investing in over time. I know multiple people who, after their first meal at Creola, resolved to return for each new menu, the same way you might buy season tickets to the opera, or regularly check out what revivals are playing at Metrograph.Helen, Help Me!E-mail your questions about dining, eating, and anything food-related, and Helen may respond in a future newsletter.Many of Lagomarsini’s dishes went in clever directions. A bowl of enormous, head-on shrimp in a gently bitter red-eye gravy evoked shrimp and grits, but the chef took a left turn away from expectation with an accompaniment of puffy brown benne-seed dinner rolls and a swirl of butter infused with the funky flavor of shrimp heads and shells. A roulade of pork collar—an underappreciated cut, all marble and depth—was stuffed with well-seasoned mustard greens and Carolina Gold rice, sprinkled with a dukkah of pecans and spices and lashed with peach Jezebel, the American South’s own vernacular agrodolce. A “Banana Puddin’ ” turned out to be crumbled molasses cake with a ruffle of white-chocolate crémeux, a segment of brûléed banana, and honey-pepper-flavored sprigs of sweet-alyssum flowers. It was more pudding in the British sense, with an unmistakable air of sticky-toffee, than it was good ol’ American creamy glop.The cookout menu runs at a hundred and twenty-five dollars per person, with an optional wine pairing for an additional sixty-five dollars: four generous, strikingly apposite pours, mostly French, selected by a sommelier friend from Lagomarsini’s fine-dining days who, quite thrillingly, insists on anonymity. There are always a few non-alcoholic options, too: with the cookout menu, they included a homemade hibiscus soda, because, Lagomarsini told me, when we spoke after my meal, “you need a red drink if you’re going to be talking about a cookout, in Black culture.” As for her next menu, she’s circling the idea of a duck gumbo, she said, and she has been working on a “really sexy” foie-gras pie, with a corn-bread crust, a whipped foie-mousse filling, and a glistening layer of Concord-grape gelée. She’ll pair that with Sauternes, of course. “If we’re doing foie gras, we’ve got to do Sauternes,” she said. “I’m sorry! My background was working at Daniel! So that’s the only way.” ?