Cover story
Pescado zarandeado
Trans-Atlantic After returning to Mex- ico, Cavita once again worked for Pujol chef patron Enrique Olvera before relo- cating to New York to work at two-Michelin- starred Nordic restau- rant Aska at Kinfolk Studios. While in New York a colleague intro- duced 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
“I think it’s
important that I’m not afraid to play with the flavours and plating, otherwise you’re constraining yourself as a chef”
24 | The Caterer | 8 March 2024
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 impor- tant 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.
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 combina- tion 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
Pan de elote (corn cake)
www.thecaterer.com Soft shell crab taco
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PHOTOS: ZAMANIEGO STUDIO; DAVID COTSWORTH
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