London Gets Another Modern Mexican Restaurant From a Chef With World-Class Pedigree

Mexican chef Adriana Cavita will open her eponymous debut restaurant on Wigmore Street in May, with a focus on Oaxacan and coastal Yucatán cooking — tetelas, tlayudas, tacos, moles; aguachiles and ceviches.

Cavita, at 56 Wigmore Street, follows her residency at the Dorchester Hotel in Mayfair over summer 2021. Dishes, which will marry Mexican traditions with British ingredients as well as importing the necessaries like chiles and corn, will include a rotating red aguachile, using watermelon and mezcal; tetelas, the Oaxacan stuffed masa triangles; a mole verde with chicken grilled over wood; and octopus with an adobo of guajillo and pasilla chiles. Cavita will also be one of the first London restaurants to benefit from Natoora’s new partnership with Tamoa, which brings in heritage varieties of Mexican corn in its dried form, ready to be nixtamalised for whatever purpose a chef may require.

The restaurant will be joined by a mezcaleria, Mayahuel, serving the distilled agave spirit; cocktails; and antojitos like esquites with English Cheshire cheese and a tuna tostada. Cavita, whose background includes Enrique Olveira’s world-class Mexican restaurant Pujol, in Mexico City, grew up in a restaurant family: her grandmother ran an antojitos business in her hometown.

Cavita joins Santiago Lastra’s Kol in the area, which opened on Seymour Street in 2020 and now holds a Michelin star. While both restaurants are entirely distinct, their approach to Mexican cuisine — self-consciously focussing on British ingredients in order to refract them through the country’s regional culinary traditions — marks an encouraging shift in thinking about what a Mexican restaurant in London can be.

More soon.