Stormingly good: the main dining room at Cavita
(Picture: Adrian Lourie)Look, this review was not meant to start like this. After weeks of touching on the operational turbulence that every new restaurant seems to be experiencing in some form — namely, the overstretched teams, under-trained servers and hurriedly configured rooms that mean even good meals threaten to descend into prank show calamity — I had personally banned myself from referring to it. Everyone is struggling. We all know that, as it stands, the world of hospitality is in a rictus scramble to recreate pre-pandemic bonhomie without the necessary staffing capacity to do so. There is no need for me to labour that point every week.
But then at Cavita in Marylebone I nipped to the loo early on to be met by not just the overpowering smell of recently applied paint (a week-and-a-half after the place had opened), but two abandoned brushes balanced on a urinal. It felt like a perfect encapsulation of the current mad, flapping panic to be ready; the ideal visual metaphor should this ultimately prove to be another well-meaning opening that felt a little rush-released and flawed.
Well, as it turns out, there’s a sizeable problem with that last bit of logic. And the problem is that this place — which is the much-anticipated debut restaurant of Mexican chef Adriana Cavita — is already absolutely stormingly good: a confident, knockout combination of abuela-level domestic generosity and top-tier chef’s technique that yields flavours which, all at once, have both familiarity and a flash of vividly drawn, jolting unexpectedness.
That brilliance became apparent early. Nestled in its dim-lit, indoor courtyard of a space, surrounded by decorative masks and a ceiling thick with trussed-up hanging plants, we began with aguachile rojo: a pretty, oceanic frieze of uncured, sashimi-style king fish, crunch-giving rainbow radish, crushed grasshopper salt, and an unassuming puddle of thin, mottled chilli sauce that hit like a freight train of rumbling heat. Pig’s head tamal brought the usual steamed corn pudding, mined with enormous chunks of pork and with saltiness neatly leavened by a tightly swaddled blanket of collard green. And smoked mushroom tetela — dense, rich fungi, plus roasted potato and other intensifying fixings heaped on what is almost a griddled, triangular tortilla pasty — was like the filthiest of muttered come-ons to vegetarians.
Cavita, the person, is a prodigious talent: a chef who was working at El Bulli as a teenager, has a degree in gastronomy and has explored her country’s under-appreciated regional foodways. Yet what’s most impressive about her restaurant is how unafraid it is to bring celebratory spirit and a fresh eye to crowd-pleasing, roadside combinations. Which means that you get a “Cesar” salad (a Mexican dish in that it was invented in the Twenties by a Tijuana hotel’s chef-owner) where robustly charred greens boost the smoky umami to a frankly unseemly level of desirability; you get appealingly messy Baja fish tacos and beef shin quesabirria with a lacy ruff of bubbled, fried cheese; and, of course, shareable mains — either a whole, wood-fired octopus or (our choice) a smoke-wreathed juicy whole chicken set in a humming green mole that can easily feed four, and comes supported by a cloth-wrapped stack of warm, palpably fresh tortillas.
Its immense quality and composure seeps into the small things that turn a meal into a pleasure
“I love this,” said my brother, jiggling the ice in his rum and pickled beetroot cocktail, referring to nothing so much as the general, glamorous crackle of the room and the rare, sure-footed warmth of the hospitality. This is the other thing to note about Cavita. Its immense quality and composure seeps into the small things that turn a meal into a pleasure. Breezy, informed staff ferry squidgy pucks of pan de elote (corn cake) pudding; Mexican folk instrumentals burble away in the background. There is undoubtedly frantic effort (and any number of mislaid paintbrushes) hidden from view. But Cavita feels, set against the wonky chaos of many other current openings, like a scintillating, fully-formed reminder of exactly how it should be done.
