We Are Ona’s Hong Kong pop-up, staged March 23–26 during the 2026 edition of Art Basel with designer Lea Colombo and Chef Daniel Boulud. Photo courtesy of We Are Ona.
THE EVOLUTION OF WE ARE ONA
by Adrian Madlener
Rose, c'est la vie, a collaboration with India Mahdavi during Art Basel Paris in 2025, which Mahdavi described as an embrace of "the seriousness of happiness."
Industry dinners are a dime a dozen these days. Creatives, influencers, brand reps, and other associates of the cultural glitterati gather to commemorate the launch of a new collection, share a meal, and shoot-the-shit. More often than not, they find themselves squished together around hastily arranged restaurant tables, where somehow, it’s hard to hear the person you’re sitting next to, with lighting that is either too bright or too dim. This poorly considered environment seems strange considering what’s brought everyone together: aesthetically successful (one hopes) artworks and designs.
Restaurateur and sommelier Luca Pronzato sought to flip the script on these get-togethers with We Are Ona, the culinary platform he launched in 2019. For him, orchestrating fully immersive dinners is an opportunity to converge the worlds of fashion, fine art, spatial design, and, of course, cuisine. He collaborates with friends across these disciplines, including Willo Perron, Sabine Marcelis, India Mahdavi, Crosby Studios, and Alexandre de Betak, on total-work-of-art theater stagings that carry the same aesthetic weight as the design world they inhabit.
We Are Ona’s Hong Kong pop-up during the 2026 edition of Art Basel. Photo courtesy of We Are Ona.
We Are Ona’s Hong Kong pop-up during the 2026 edition of Art Basel. Photo courtesy of We Are Ona.
We Are Ona’s Hong Kong pop-up during the 2026 edition of Art Basel. Photo courtesy of We Are Ona.
We Are Ona’s multi-course menus are developed to reflect the spatial design themes in collaboration with notable Michelin-star chefs such as José Andrés, Solemann Haddad, and Dalad Kambhu. “Having worked in hospitality for many years, I often felt that things were too vertical and constrained by fixed space,” Pronzato says. “I wanted to create a way for today’s top food talents to express themselves in shorter formats, while applying the standards of the design and art worlds to create thoughtful, well-executed experiences.”
Most of the pop-ups are mounted on the platform’s own initiative, planned to coincide with major art and design fairs as well as fashion weeks in Europe, North America, and the Middle East. The brand also hosts an expanding roster of creative events, developing invite-only dinners for leading brands including Adidas, Nike, and Salomon —with activations for all three in just the first two months of 2026 alone.
With We Are Ona’s most recent installment, a three-night dinner series at the end of last month, hosted during Art Basel Hong Kong and imagined by South African polymath Lea Colombo and Daniel Boulud, the pop-up hits two new milestones: a vast extension of its global reach and a collaboration with a chef at the top of his field. The Hong Kong event is the apex of the itinerant model that Pronzato and his collaborators have been building for the past seven years, and to mark the occasion, we chart the evolution of the series, presenting an anthology of its defining moments.
Early days: L'Appart, We Are Ona’s breakfast and teatime-only pop-up on a Parisian rooftop in the fall of 2019, featuring pastry chefs Charlotte Billecoq and Michael Watson. Photo by Bastien Lattanzio courtesy of We Are Ona.
2019
After an initial experiment in which Pronzato set up a restaurant in Costa da Caparica, Portugal for six months, We Are Ona’s first actual pop-up took place during the summer 2019 hometown edition of Art Basel, where chefs Thibaut Marlin and Clément Guernalec took over a former water reservoir facility and cooked locally-sourced produce and foraged ingredients over an open fire. The next project, L’Appart, saw pastry chefs Charlotte Billecoq and Michael Watson serving 10-course breakfasts and tea-time menus in a rooftop flat overlooking Paris in the fall of that year. “Early on, we wanted to test out different formats,” Pronzato said. “Straightaway, our guests responded well to this high level of culinary and spatial experience.”
2020
After mounting pop-ups in Swiss ski resort town Zermatt in 2019 and a library-themed experience in Lisbon in January 2020, COVID-19 hit, and in-person events were banned. Back in Paris, Pronzato developed a panier (basket) service delivering the ingredients for chef-curated dishes to clients across town.
We Are Ona's pop-up for the 2022 Venice Biennale at a Palazzio in the Castello District, with a culinary experience by Chef Thomas Coupeau. Photo courtesy of We Are Ona.
We Are Ona's 2022 pop-up in Arles, France for les Recontres de la Photographie. © Ilya Kagan courtesy of We Are Ona.
We Are Ona's 2022 pop-up in Arles, France for les Recontres de la Photographie. © Ilya Kagan courtesy of We Are Ona.
2021–2022
So as not to directly compete with many of the restaurants struggling to emerge from the pandemic unscathed, We Are Ona began to solidify its more ephemeral one-to-three-day format. These happenings included a Palazzo experience at the postponed edition of the Venice Art Biennale in April 2022, an event for Italian lighting brand Flos at Fabbrica Orobia during the delayed Salone del Mobile that June, and dinners for the annual photography festival Les Rencontres de la Photographie d’Arles in an old stable-turned-pool-house that July. “This was the moment when we fused the event and hospitality world,” he says.
We Are Ona's pop-up in collaboration with SIZED SELECTS and Perron-Roettinger in the former Howard Hughes headquarters during Frieze Los Angeles 2024. Photo courtesy of We Are Ona.
We Are Ona's pop-up in collaboration with SIZED SELECTS and Perron-Roettinger in the former Howard Hughes headquarters during Frieze Los Angeles 2024. Photo courtesy of We Are Ona.
We Are Ona's pop-up in collaboration with SIZED SELECTS and Perron-Roettinger in the former Howard Hughes headquarters during Frieze Los Angeles 2024. Photo courtesy of We Are Ona.
We Are Ona's pop-up in collaboration with SIZED SELECTS and Perron-Roettinger in the former Howard Hughes headquarters during Frieze Los Angeles 2024. Photo courtesy of We Are Ona.
We Are Ona's 2023 pop-up, designed in collaboration with Harry Nuriev and Crosby Studios, featuring Michelin-starred chef Mory Sacko. Hosted at the WSA building in New York City in alignment with Frieze and TEFAF.
2023–2024
The platform began its collaboration with Willo Perron in 2023, developing a dinner experience for Los Angeles’s Frieze Week featuring exclusive ceramic dinnerware by artist Peter Shire. The following year, Perron and Pronzato collaborated again at the Howard Hughes Headquarters, imagined in partnership with collectible design purveyor SIZED, Swiss furniture brand USM, and scenographic practice Perron Studios. Guests sat well-spaced out along a long, sleek table next to vintage BMW sports cars.
We Are Ona also made its New York début during Art and Design Week in 2023. Crosby Studios designed a bold setting high up in the newly opened WSA building. The space was wrapped in metallics and sharp oranges, with an open kitchen visible to guests. French architect Marc Leschelier’s intervention in the same building the following year reflected a more muted, raw brutalist — almost BDSM — aesthetic.
We Are Ona's 2025 pop-up in collaboration with public art initiative Manar Abu Dhabi and chef Solemann Haddad. Inspired by the ancient rituals of outdoor cooking, guests gathered under a monumental smoke dome. Photo courtesy of We Are Ona.
2025
The theme of primal outdoor cooking was reprised with the especially dramatic Manar Abu Dhabi happening in November 2025. Soon after, Sabine Marcelis came into the picture with a colorful and luminous beach-front dinner and lunch experience staged at the Adaz Miami Beach Resort — during that city’s edition of Art Basel. “Through these projects, the talents have been able to express themselves on a more emotional level,” Pronzato said. “One can go into a design exhibition but actually sitting down and using the objects on view — consuming these sculptures — is something entirely different. It’s fully sensorial and helps establish stronger memories.”
Clearly, the demand for shared immersive experiences — antidotes to the rise of virtual hegemony — hasn’t faded. It’s just shifted, away from the marketing ploy gimmickry of immersive experiences like Imagine Van Gogh or the Instagram-ready backdrops of the Museum of Ice Cream. We Are Ona is a far more elevated alternative that still somehow manages to engage a broad audience. The pop-up dinners are not the insular, closed-door affairs that prop up the contemporary creative industries — they are ticketed and open to the public, accessible to anyone willing to pay.
We Are Ona's culinary installation at Art Basel Miami Beach 2025, in collaboration with Sabine Marcelis and chef José Andrés. Photo courtesy of We Are Ona.
We Are Ona's culinary installation at Art Basel Miami Beach 2025, in collaboration with Sabine Marcelis and chef José Andrés. Photo courtesy of We Are Ona.
We Are Ona's culinary installation at Art Basel Miami Beach 2025, in collaboration with Sabine Marcelis and chef José Andrés. Photo courtesy of We Are Ona.