Wahaca

Food & Drink, Food Topics & Trends

Underground Restaurants

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.

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.