It all started in his grandmother’s kitchen.
Long before tasting menus or Michelin inspectors, Carlos Delgado was trailing behind his grandmother, Chelita, through the markets of Callao, the port city just outside Lima where he grew up. She cooked three meals a day, every day, and Delgado was her shadow. He fetched. He cleaned. He did whatever was needed, including killing and bleeding chickens when the work demanded it. When she could not watch him, his babysitter was the owner of a neighborhood ceviche restaurant, where Delgado absorbed the rhythms of hospitality before he had language for what he was seeing.
That early immersion shaped everything that followed.
Today, Delgado is the chef behind Causa, a tasting menu restaurant secreted away in Blagden Alley in Washington, D.C.’s Shaw neighborhood. Its two-story brick façade is artfully tattooed with black-and-white murals of iconic rainforest creatures: a parrot, a snake, a butterfly. The imagery is not decorative. It is directional. Inside, Delgado traces the geography of his home country across a menu that moves from Peru’s deep blue coastal waters to the soaring heights of the Andes and into the lush depths of the Amazon.
Delgado immigrated to the United States with his mother, settling in Northern Virginia. After studying culinary arts at the Art Institute of Washington in Arlington, he began building a career in professional kitchens, including a formative stint at Volt in Frederick, Maryland, under Bryan Voltaggio, followed by roles at Policy, Smith Commons, and Bóveda, a Latin speakeasy inside the Westin Georgetown. In 2014, he opened Ocopa, a ceviche bar on the then-fledgling H Street NE corridor, marking his first opportunity to center Peruvian cuisine on his own terms. It was also where he began collaborating with Glendon Hartley, commissioning the rising bar star to design a pisco-forward cocktail program.
