The change of direction, that includes a new menu, comes after Cavita’s travels across Mexico and into the Amazon, to the farmers, cooks and indigenous communities behind the food she has served at her London restaurant since 2022.
On her most recent journey, the chef spent a month in the western Amazon, as a guest of the Ashaninka people, alongside a group of Indigenous leaders. Here she was given the new name Tonakaziwatl by her teacher at a spring solstice ceremony in Xochimilco, on the southern edge of Mexico City. The name is said to carries the idea of the sun holding feminine and masculine together, and of a seed from which consciousness can grow.
“Cavita holds my first chapter,” she says. “Tonakaziwatl is for what comes next.”
The relaunch marks a change of direction for Cavita, which will serve a menu created by Cavita and her female-led kitchen team rather than by her alone. Ingredients will include creel-caught langoustines, line-caught British fish, and regenerative vegetables from small farms. Corn will be nixtamalised in house from heirloom, non-GMO varieties, and beans and chillies will be sourced from Indigenous growers in Mexico.
New dishes will include chochoyotes - the dimpled masa dumplings Cavita learned to make while living in Oaxaca, served with stracciatella, sungold tomatoes, Corsican basil, Mexican oregano and a parsley beurre blanc; and aguachile negro - Carlingford oysters and prawns in a leche de tigre darkened with tortilla ash and tahini and spiked with chiltepin, a small chilli grown in Mexico.
“Before, the menu came from my own memories. This one belongs to the whole kitchen,” says Cavita. “Every dish starts with a place or a person, and we want to tell you about them.”
The change of direction s also reflected in the restaurant, where diners will be met at the entrance by the scent of palo santo, the sacred wood burned in ceremonies across Latin America.
Cavita’s year of travel is the subject of a forthcoming documentary, El Camino de Cavita, which follows the ancestral roots of Mexican cooking through the people and places keeping it alive.
Cavita relaunches in October.