OJT EATS | CAVITA
There’s been a rise in high end Mexican restaurants in London lately and one of the more recent examples of this is Cavita on Wigmore street in Marylebone. Sat sort of behind Selfridges, it’s a bit of a non-descript entrance but once inside, it looks great! We were pretty hungry so straight into the food!
This was a pig’s head tamal. Wrapped in a collared green leaf and with a salsa verde sauce on the side, it was really very tasty. The corn maize of the tamal had a nice sweetness to it and the pigs head inside was cooked down to this unctuous tender meat; delicious!
These smoked beef shin quesabirrias were a little disappointing to be honest. They were a harder and chewier than I was expecting. The gravy was nice and thick and the flavours were great, just a bit more of a work out for my jaw than I’d like.
The smoked mushroom tetela was like a Mexican samosa but with a blue corn tortilla, grilled and not fried (so not much like a samosa at all). The filling had mushroom and goats curd along with the mushroom and was all in all, pretty good!
Baja fish tacos. Really well fried piece of fish with some lacto fermented cabbage and a chipotle salsa. Fish was light, crisp, salsa was slightly smoky and the cabbage provided a bit of acidity just to set the whole thing off. Definitely would order these again.
Cavita has a few options of sharing tacos. One of which was the mole verde which is what we ordered. This was a wood fire grilled chicken on a bed of coal roasted veggies, all with a green sauce. The chicken was super tender with a lovely smokiness and slight char from the fire. I could quite easily just have eaten this as a dish by itself.
I didn’t have to though as all the sharing plates come with blue corn tortillas and rice.
We added a side of more of that lacto fermented cabbage. We clearly hadn’t seen the fish tacos arrive when we ordered it as we were expecting a full on side of cabbage. What we got was essentially sauerkraut that while good with the food, didn’t quite match our expectations. Still, it all went pretty well with the chicken.
For dessert, we had a corn cake with salted caramel ice cream. The corn cake was like cornbread but much less dense and a stronger sweetness to it that I really enjoyed. It was still less sweet than your average cake though so the addition of the ice cream wasn’t overly sickly.
Overall, we really enjoyed this meal. I’m not sure Mexican food will ever be my favourite cuisine but this, along with El Pastor (read about our trip here) is pretty high up my list of Mexican food in London!
Cavita, 60 Wigmore Street, W1U 2RZ
Cheers, JL
