Test Kitchen Lab Is Moving Into Wake Medellín's New Hub

The story of Test Kitchen Lab Medellín Wake is the clearest signal yet of how much the top of this city’s dining scene has consolidated into a single address. TEST Kitchen Lab — the small chef’s counter run by chef Adolfo Cavalie and bartender Daniela Alvarado — is relocating out of its standalone Provenza townhouse and into the new Wake hotel complex a few blocks away, where it will occupy a larger, lab-like space dedicated to Colombian-only sourcing and fermentation research.

That puts TEST alongside Boro and Osso under one roof, and makes Wake the biggest single cluster of high-end restaurant openings Medellín has seen this year.

What Test Kitchen Lab Is Today

TEST currently sits at Carrera 34 #8a-10 in Provenza, El Poblado. No source we could find publishes a seat count, so take it as a small room rather than a specific number: diners sit at tables set around an extensive bar, and the draw is watching the chef assemble a dish in front of them, according to El Tiempo’s profile of the restaurant.

The kitchen leans almost entirely on Colombian produce — El Tiempo noted that nothing except the liquors was foreign — and builds a tasting menu that changes with seasonality rather than repeating a fixed script.

Tasting menu prices, as published by El Tiempo in October 2023 (nearly three years old — reference points, not current prices):

• Four courses — 190,000 COP (260,000 COP with wine pairing)
• Eight courses — 330,000 COP (420,000 COP with pairing)

A move into a new venue is exactly the kind of moment restaurants use to reset a menu and its cost, so confirm directly when you book.

Test Kitchen Lab Medellín Wake: Fermentation as the House Style

The relocation is being framed as an expansion of method, not just square metres. The new space is described as a larger, lab-style room organised around fermentation research and all-Colombian sourcing — an approach that fits what the kitchen was already doing. Cavalie’s work at TEST has been characterised as an almost scientific study of Colombian biodiversity, and fermentation is the natural infrastructure for that: it is how a kitchen that refuses imported ingredients builds acidity, depth, and umami from what grows in Antioquia, Chocó, and the Amazon instead.

For diners, the practical difference should be a longer bench, more visible process, and a counter format with room to actually be a counter. If you want the wider context on why this format is spreading in Medellín, we covered it in chef’s tables and hidden kitchens.

Wake Is Becoming Medellín’s Restaurant Row

Wake Medellín opened in Provenza in June 2026 as what its operators call Colombia’s first “Social Wellness Hub,” built on a roughly 250,000-million-peso investment — around US$65 million at 2026 rates, the figure cited in English-language coverage. The property is affiliated with Design Hotels and combines 58 hotel rooms across 10 typologies with 70 apartments, plus a “Wholeness Floor” holding an infrared sauna, steam bath, floating tanks, and a yoga studio.

The food and drink line-up now reads like a shortlist of the city’s 2026 openings:

• Boro — the Medellín restaurant from Cartagena chef Jaime Rodríguez of Celele. We covered Boro’s opening here.
• Osso — Renzo Garibaldi’s Lima carnivería, ranked No. 44 on Latin America’s 50 Best Restaurants 2025. See our Osso Medellín piece.
• TEST Kitchen Lab — relocating from Provenza, per the reporting above.
• Krudo Viches y Vinilos — also relocating into the complex.
• Glu Glu — a new wine bar, named in Forbes’ report on the property.

Four of those are either imports or relocations of already-established names. That is the notable part: Wake is not incubating new concepts so much as concentrating existing ones, which changes how you plan a night out in El Poblado. A single block now holds a Colombian tasting counter, a World’s 50 Best chef’s project, and a Peruvian dry-aged beef temple.

What We Could Not Confirm

As of July 20, 2026, we found no published date for TEST Kitchen Lab’s first service inside Wake, and no confirmed seat count, address suite, or pricing for the new room. Reporting establishes that the move and the fermentation-lab expansion are happening; it does not pin down when. The Provenza location’s status during the transition is likewise unconfirmed.

If you are planning a trip around this, the safe read is: book the current Provenza counter if it is still taking reservations, and check the restaurant’s own channels before assuming either address is live. For everything else moving in the city this month, see our July 2026 restaurant news roundup.