Cavita

Cavita opened on Wigmore Street in May 2022 and built its reputation quickly, largely on the strength of chef Adriana Cavita’s background, time spent at El Bulli and Pujol among other serious kitchens, applied to Mexican cooking that refuses to default to the burritos-and-fajitas version of the cuisine most of London still expects.

Small plates dominate the format: hamachi tostadas handle the raw, citrus-forward end of the menu, while a concise taco list keeps street-food energy present without diluting focus. The pig’s head tamal and a whole grilled octopus are the dishes reviewers return to most often, both built around bold, carefully layered flavour rather than heat for its own sake. The kitchen clearly takes the wider tradition of Mexican cooking seriously rather than leaning on street-food shorthand alone, and dishes are built for sharing across the table rather than as individual plates.

The room itself is genuinely pretty: exposed brick painted a soft coral, plants hanging through the space, a basement bar below and a bright ground-floor dining room with sightlines into the open kitchen, letting diners watch the pass without it feeling like forced spectacle. The basement bar mixes tequila and mezcal-based cocktails worth a stop in their own right, before or after the meal upstairs.

Several reviewers have called it among the best Mexican cooking in London, a claim that holds up reasonably well against the more established competition given how quickly Cavita established its identity after opening.

The honest caveat is the small-plates pricing model: individual dishes look reasonable in isolation, but ordering enough to properly fill a table across starters, tacos and mains pushes the bill up quickly, a familiar trap with this format across London generally rather than something unique to Cavita. Booking ahead is sensible given the buzz the restaurant has built since opening, particularly for weekend dinner slots, and it has quickly become one of the more talked-about openings in Marylebone over the past few years, holding its own against a neighbourhood not short of ambitious new restaurants competing for the same well-heeled Marylebone crowd and their evening bookings, no small feat in a part of London that changes its favourite restaurant every few months.