Don’t let the contemporary simplicity of this 22-seat restaurant (pictured above) deceive you. Causa is star Peruvian Chef Carlos Delgado’s layered, eye-popping, taste-tingling valentine to his native land. His fish-centric 6-course tasting menu is a bold, innovative take on modern Nikkei-Peruvian fare, that complex fusion of Japanese and Peruvian cuisines that has helped put modern Peru on the international culinary map.
Presentation here is as important as taste. Each dish on its prix fixe menu is a show-stopping work of art, some arranged on pebbles, shells, or wood shavings, others balanced atop porcelain holders or stone slabs, still others crowned with edible flowers. (An appetizer sampler is pictured below.) What’s more, you can watch them come skillfully to life in the open kitchen.
The tasting menu showcases an ocean’s worth of seafood: black cod, eel, ocean trout, octopus, salmon roe, scallops, sea urchin, squid and tuna—much of it appearing in the mixed Nikkei ceviche. Like the ceviche, many dishes deliver a salty, tangy, pungent flavor blast. Take the dry-aged miso-marinaded black cod, garnished with pureed sunchokes, crumbled chips, pickled piquillo pepper, and whisper-thin black garlic tuile. Meat takes a turn, too, as a Wagyu beef bite-sized sampler grilled on charcoal.
