Adriana Cavita has 'redefined' London's Mexican food scene

However, despite the immediate critical success of Cavita, 2022 was a tumultuous time for the chef. Shortly after opening the venue to rave reviews, she was forced to leave the UK for eight months while waiting for a visa to be processed.

But now, having been back at the helm of the restaurant for almost 10 months, she isrelishing the opportunity to take stock, although it would be foolish to expect Cavita to stand still for long – even her enforced eight-month hiatus was used for research trips and to write her first book, Cocina Mexicana.

Indeed, 2024 has already seen her relaunch the restaurant's underground bar as El Bar de Cavita, serving margaritas, mezcal and Mexican street food, while a further collaboration with cocktail maestro Ryan Chetiyawardana – or Mr Lyan – is in the works. A focus on staff training is also being planned, along with a reworking of the restaurant's menus to showcase dishes from regions of Mexico that are scarcely seen in the capital.

The chef's passion for her native cuisine has guided her career. It began with her decision to study gastronomy at Universidad del Claustro de Sor Juana in Mexico City, one of the few universities to incorporate Mexican cuisine in the course. She has increasingly found purpose in studying Mexican food and preserving its techniques and traditions. As such, a conversation with Cavita takes frequent and fascinating tangents into the history of the domestication of corn, ancient techniques for preparing and cooking dishes and the conviviality of rural markets.

Her passion has been nurtured by several remarkable women, including her grandmother and the mother of a colleague who invited the chef into her Oaxaca home to study her recipes. Cavita has also spent time with indigenous communities in Mexico and in wider central America.

She says: "Meeting all these women in different regions, they inspired me so much because I feel they are very strong and they carry a lot of love. What keeps people cooking the same recipes for years? It's this nurturing nature of woman. In the past couple of years, hanging out with indigenous communities has inspired me a lot, particularly how they take care of the land, share their wisdom with new generations and make them care about it. That's something I feel we've been missing in wider society."

Where Adriana Cavita found her influence

As a child Cavita spent a lot of time with her grandparents, who lived in the ancient town of Azcapotzalco in the north of Mexico City. Her grandfather had a farm and imbued her with a respect and interest in produce, while her grandmother ran a small restaurant from the family home's garage, selling huaraches, tamales and quesadilla.

Cavita says: "She was visionary; she loved her food business and she transmitted that love to me."

While the influence of her grandmother undoubtedly ignited an interest in hospitality, Cavita initially dismissed the idea of training to be a chef. She failed to see the career potential and was put off by the machismo of professional kitchens. Nevertheless, when it came to picking a university course, gastronomy pulled her in and her early memories are carried through to the menu at Cavita in Wigmore Street. The interiors are inspired by her grandmother's house, with terracotta tones dripping with the greenery of ferns and houseplants alongside artworks by Cavita's friends as well as ornaments and objects collected through her travels.

She says: "It's a little bit of home. The idea was to create my grandmother's patio. She used to have a lot of plants and her house had stairs on the outside, with all the plants growing up and on top. I thought we needed to bring that here."

Cavita's menus take influence from a broad range of Mexican cuisine, from beautifully prepared seafood to street food and the moles or sauces she was taught by her friend's mother in Oaxaca. She says: "One of our bestsellers is quesabirria, which is from the north of Mexico and it's a very messy street food. It's slow-cooked beef shin, cooked with dried chillies and spices, which is then shredded. We take the juice from the meat and reduce it. We do a grilled cheese and put the tortilla with the meat inside. People can put some lime juice on top, dip it in the juice and eat it. I want people to eat it with their hands."

While studying, Cavita worked at Pujol in Mexico City before travelling to Spain to work at three-Michelin-starred El Bulli up to its closure in 2011. She describes her time at the restaurant as formative and says: "El Bulli was very professional, the communication, how tidy everything was, the way they ran everything. It was mind-blowing for me."

Learning Mexican recipes from the best

After returning to Mexico, Cavita once again worked for Pujol chef patron Enrique Olvera before relocating to New York to work at two-Michelin-starred Nordic restaurant Aska at Kinfolk Studios. While in New York a colleague introduced her to his mother, Juana Amaya, and when Cavita returned to Mexico she travelled to Oaxaca to learn from her.

She says: "I felt very connected to Juana. She cooked with me and I asked her to teach me and then I ended up living with her for eight months. Watching her cook Mexican food was a pinch of this, grab some of that, and I was there like ‘but how are the future generations going to reproduce this?'

"So we started to write down all of her recipes, which are now in a book that we haven't published yet. Most of the recipes have a history or a connection to the land and she always had something to add about her life or the environment. That's when I felt really connected to what we were cooking."

Cavita then began to travel widely around her home country, building her knowledge of regional cuisine. She says: "Unless you travel you do not realise how different the country is. I feel very passionate about the diversity of Mexico. We have about 54 languages and communities, which are still alive and all the art and creativity that comes from that diversity is amazing.

"There's a community that grows 34 different corn varieties for different food and drinks. That passion is why it's so important for me to use corn from Mexico in the restaurant. It means I can reproduce the tostada the same as it is in Mexico, with the right flavour, and it supports farmers because it is very hard to grow organic corn in Mexico. It's expensive and hard to compete, so it's important to me that we use that."

Eventually, a call from Eduardo Garcia bought Cavita to London to work at Peyotito in Notting Hill, up to its closure. She then opened a catering company and ran a series of pop-ups, including a residency at London's Carousel, before Cavita was born during the pandemic.

How Cavita was an immediate hit

Cavita recalls looking around the site while the streets were still largely empty of the West End workforce and thinking it was a bigger than she had anticipated. She needn't have worried. Despite scrambling to open at a time when finding builders or an electrician was almost impossible, Cavita was an immediate hit.

The Evening Standard's Jimi Famurewa described the restaurant as "stormingly good", adding "[It's] 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."

And it was Tim Hayward, writing for the Financial Times, who declared that the restaurant had "redefined London's Mexican food scene".

However, despite critical acclaim, it was not all plain sailing and, after just six months of operation, Cavita was forced to leave the country.

She explains: "I was getting divorced and we had a lawyer who did not advise us well and so I had to go back to Mexico. We thought it would be two or three months but it was eight. It was horrible – at some point I had a panic attack – but I said to myself: ‘I need to let it be, what's going to happen will happen'.

"I wrote the book and just spent time with my family. Looking back, I see the good and the bad."

Cavita's "amazing" team stepped up in exceptionally difficult circumstances and she returned to the UK in May last year. Since then she has been on the ground, pouring her creativity into the restaurant.

While Cavita has worked at high-end, fine dining restaurants, it is those recipes passed down through generations in the domestic sphere that underpin much of her cooking; albeit by the time reach the menu they have been refined and adapted, often with playful twists. She says: "I wanted to do the most representative cooking, but I also needed to adapt recipes as we're in a different country and using different ingredients. Some of the recipes we serve are very traditional and others are more modern.

"I don't want to close anything off – I think the creativity should be open. For me, the important thing is to keep some recipes very authentic and traditional so those flavours are there, but I also think it's important that I'm not afraid to play with the flavours and plating, otherwise I'm constraining myself as a chef and it's less fun for me and for the customer. It's fun if they see something different or playful on the menu."

It's also important to Cavita that she shows the breadth of Mexican cuisine and dispels some of the ‘myths' that surround it. For example, bacalao a la vizcaina, a fish stew which originates from Veracruz, appeared as a Christmas special. The stew, originally made with cod, was adapted into a vegetarian dish that surprised guests with its Mediterranean feel, combining tomatoes, onion, garlic, olives and capers.

The chef says: "It's because of all those influences from Spain. We serve it with potatoes, pimento peppers, aubergine, cauliflower or any vegetable we have. Sometimes people are like ‘is this Mexican?' and I like that. I like to share different things with people. Mexico has had influences from Asia and Europe and people don't realise that we have a huge diversity of flavours and textures."

Looking forward, the chef is focusing on fine tuning every element of the restaurant. "I feel like the most rewarding thing I can have is a happy team and a successful restaurant," she says. "It's about creating a stable business. If we can pay everything and everyone and have some money to make this place better, that's enough at the moment. If more comes, it's welcome, but I'm not focused on that.

For me, I have my kitchen where I can create and share what I love to do. Somehow that's really enough."

From the menu

Raw bar

• Chutoro tostada: sashimi-grade tuna dressed in a soy and ginger vinaigrette with sesame seeds and avocado purée, served on an heirloom corn tostada
• Mooli ceviche tostada: pomegranate and avocado in a burnt Habañero and onion salsa with lemon balm served on an heirloom corn tostada

Appetisers

• Tamal de puerco: crushed handmade corn dough stuffed with slow-roasted free-range Norfolk pork in a guajillo sauce, steamed in a banana leaf with a little duck fat
• Tetela de hongos: a handmade triangular corn parcel cooked on comal, filled with potato purée and topped with seasonal mushrooms, goats' curd guacsalsa and mixed herbs with arbol sauce

From the street

• Tacos de pastor: Secreto Iberico pork in a pastor marination, grilled over charcoal and served in handmade tortillas with guacasalsa, grilled pineapple, Habañero sauce and coriander
• Quesabirria: slow-cooked beef shin marinated in a guajillo adobo sauce served in folded crispy raclette cheese tortillas and veal bone consommé

To share

• Pescado zarandeado: wild line-caught sea bass cooked over live fire in herbs marination with a green sauce of jalapeño, lime and pumpkin seeds served with rice and tortillas
• Berenjena a la vizcaina: smoked aubergine finished in a traditional sauce from Veracruz of tomatoes, olives, almonds and parsley, served with charred sourdough