FEATURES | FLORIDA
Chef Sebastian La Rocca Is Finally Staying for Dinner
After cooking across three continents, the Argentine chef is building a life in Vero Beach with room for the long meals that started it all.
By Eric Barton | Oct. 15, 2026
AUTHOR BIO: Eric Barton is editor of The Adventurist and a freelance journalist who has reviewed restaurants for more than two decades. Email him here.
On Sundays in Sebastian La Rocca’s family, the midday meal required most of the day. The Argentine asado began around 11 in the morning with cheese, salami, and conversation, then moved through chorizo, offal, and cuts of beef slow-cooked over fire. By five or six, everyone might still be at the table. Growing up in Buenos Aires with Italian roots, he understood that lunch could occupy an afternoon without anybody considering that a problem.
“Sundays were sacred,” he told me.
Now, after building a career across three continents and more than 10 cities, La Rocca is trying to give the rest of his week something of what those Sundays had: good food, people he cares about, and time to enjoy both.
La Rocca has cooked for Jamie Oliver in London, hosted television in Costa Rica, and led FYR in Columbus, Ohio, which made USA Today’s 2024 Restaurants of the Year list. Now, as culinary director of Windward Restaurant Concepts, he’s shaping The Blu Fin, Turtle Cove Gourmet Market, and The Motley Cow in Vero Beach. The assignment brings his Mediterranean influences and Latin American cooking to Florida’s Treasure Coast. It also gives a chef accustomed to leaving somewhere a reason to stay.
His first kitchen belonged to his grandmother. Around age five, he began cooking beside her, learning dishes he can still name with the certainty of someone recalling the layout of his childhood home: humita, Salta-style empanadas, pastel de papa, milanesas, and flan. Pasta and slow-cooked sauces were part of the family’s Sundays, alongside the asado.
“She taught me something that no culinary school can truly teach you: cooking is an act of love,” he recalls.
Professional cooking took him far from that kitchen. His résumé grew to include Faena in Buenos Aires and, in London, Barbecoa, Oliver’s restaurant devoted to cooking with fire. By then, La Rocca had spent years working with international cuisines and fine-dining techniques. Somewhere in the process, he had drifted from the food he grew up eating.
At Barbecoa, Oliver gave him freedom to experiment. Working over fire brought back the flavors and rituals of Argentina, giving him a way forward that drew on what he already knew. “I began to understand,” he said, “that my heritage wasn't something I needed to leave behind to evolve as a chef. It was actually one of my greatest strengths.”
Costa Rica followed. He directed the culinary program at El Mangroove, hosted the cooking show Sabores, and opened Botaniko near San José, applying Argentine wood-fire traditions to Costa Rican ingredients. In 2018, he opened Cvltvra in Miami, bringing Mediterranean and South American flavors together.
Then, in 2021, his father died in an accident. La Rocca and his four siblings, scattered around the world, gathered under one roof for the first time in 25 years. “In a way, my father brought us all home one last time,” he said. The loss changed his priorities. He began thinking harder about the people and pleasures that could get deferred while a career kept advancing.
Work continued to bring opportunities. In 2022, he joined the Hilton Columbus Downtown, overseeing restaurants including FYR. Two years later, he prepared a dinner tied to the Deep Space Food Challenge symposium, whose hosts included NASA. He spent nearly three weeks researching the history of space food, considering how meals could provide nourishment and comfort under extraordinary constraints. The exercise reinforced his belief in removing unnecessary elements and making each ingredient count.
Eventually, he applied a similar scrutiny to his own life. Before turning 50, he wanted to settle by the ocean, with time for cooking, sports, and the outdoors. Vero Beach offered the possibility.
At The Blu Fin, his influences meet in dishes such as ribeye with chimichurri, pepper escabeche, and Barolo onion jus. Across the three Windward venues, he wants to develop younger cooks and give them opportunities to advance. He also wants a life beyond the kitchen. “For most of my career, I was focused on where I wanted to go next. Today, for the first time in a long time, I'm focused on enjoying where I am.”
Those childhood Sundays lasted because nobody was in a hurry to leave. La Rocca has spent much of his career acquiring the experience to lead kitchens around the world. Staying will require a different kind of discipline: protecting time that could so easily become another service, another project, another move. He learned early how much could happen around a table over seven unhurried hours. Now he’s trying to leave himself enough time to sit down.
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