Wahaca

Food & Drink, Food Topics & Trends

Underground Restaurants

Brixton Underground courtesy of Greything via Flickr Creative Commons

Ever since Mark went to MsMarmitelover’s Underground Restaurant in Kilburn we’ve been really into underground restaurants. They seem to be popping up left right and centre at the moment and we love it. It seems to have emerged as a proper, little trend. Between us we’ve had vegetarian sushi at Horton Jupiter’s Secret Ingredient in a council estate in Hackney and Thomasina is having her wedding catered by The Moveable Restaurant who are putting on some really fun evenings such as the recent Elizabeth David dinner.

We’ve also stumbled across and are keen to visit:

• A series of secret dinners hosted by Salad Club
• The Pale Blue Door which is housed in a weird doll’s house and culminates in a Tina Turner drag act
• And a Times food writer giving it a go herself

The worse the credit crunch gets, the more creative everyone seems to get. The underground restaurant movement is quite a big thing abroad. In the US Ghetto Gourmet is massive, in Cuba palidares are the best places to eat and in Paris Jim Haynes is well ahead of the curve. We’re convinced there are plenty of Mexican underground restaurants and going to do some digging. If anyone knows of an underground restaurant in Mexico, can you let us know please.

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Food & Drink, Food Topics & Trends

Eat for a Fiver

Image from Paul Hudson via Flickr Creative Commons

The Guardian caused a bit of a stir by publishing a range of dishes from some well known cooks that could apparently all be made for £5. But readers complained that many of them would cost well over a fiver once you’d accounted for all the extras such as olive oil and salt. Zappa2007 wrote:

“Dinner for under a fiver? We don’t think so. We visited Sainsbury’s online and costed up the ingredients for these recipes. To buy all of the items would cost £22.16 (and thats without salt or olive oil!) though it does include a generous portion of cheese. As yet Sainsbury’s does not sell items by the teaspoon or the sprinkle. Even if we then worked out the pro rata cost per sprinkle and teaspoon we could only get the cost down to £5.39.

We are all in favour of cooking on a budget in these straightened times but slap my thighs and call me nancy if we could knock up Delia’s food as cheaply as she can. Are we missing something?”

Thanks to the comments of Zappa2007 and many others, the Guardian opened up the £5 recipe challenge to its readers and the published the best recipes from the likes of:

Into the Pot – Crostini followed by tomato rigatonefor £3.64
Eat the Right Stuff – Spinach, lemon and peppered mackerel pilaf followed by berry ice cream for £4.63
Football and a Baby – Cabbage bhajis followed by chanamasala for just under a fiver
Dinner Diary – Courgette soup followed by crab spaghetti for £4.98

We love the fact that the Guardian is embracing the online food world so wholeheartedly and wish we’d picked up on this sooner so we could have entered a few of our Mexican street food dishes. In fact, that’s a great idea. We’ll write a post that explains how to make Mexican food at home for a fiver. Watch this space.

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Food & Drink, Pairings

Pairings

We love the way whisky pairs with cheese and chocolate can pair with wine… so we’re going to explore the different ways that Mexican food can pair with tequila, beer, wine, music, art and all sorts of other themes. It’s going to be a lot of fun. If you’ve got an idea, let us know.

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Food & Drink, Supplier Articles

Supplier Articles

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Banter at the Bar, Wahacos

Banter at the Bar

A lot of fun stuff happens at the bar. Stories are told. Jokes get laughed at. And stuff you never imagined would happen, happens. For cocktail recipes click here.

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History & Heritage, Wahacos

History and Heritage

Stay tuned for updates about how Wahaca was conceived and continues to evolve. Frequently our team head over to Mexico to see family and explore new ideas. We will post the stories here.

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Get the Manager

GET THE MANAGER

We don’t like letting people down, so if there’s something that didn’t meet your expectations, let us know leaving a comment or emailing us at getthemanager@wahaca.co.uk

Illustration by Peter Ryan

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Compliments to the Chef

COMPLIMENTS TO THE CHEF

If you particularly like something that you’ve eaten at Wahaca, let us know so that we can make it even better (and give our chef’s a hard earned pat on the back).

Give us your feedback via the comments section of this post.

1 person likes this post.

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Music

FACE THE MUSIC

We like to keep our music as fresh as our food.  Help us decide the best tunes to munch to by voting in our surveys and giving us your suggestions.

Tell us about your favourite tunes via the comments section of this post.

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Recipes & Cooking Tips

RECIPES & COOKING TIPS

Wahaca takes Mexican-inspired dishes and sources them as ethically and as locally as possible.  We’ll upload some of our recipes from time to time, and if you want to recommend some of your own, we might even cook them for you.

Tell us about your favourite recipes via the comments section of this post.

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