We went to Bibendum Wine to enjoy one of the many perks of our job – wine training! Dan from Bibendum has written a post about the day, including a video where our very own Pedro and Robin describe a fantastic addition to our list:
It’s probably not your average common or garden wine. “Oh yeah, I’ll have your Cabernet/Zin/Barbera/Petite Sirah blend from Baja California please” is not a phrase you’re likely to hear down the local pub. But that is the point of it – this wine is so unique! Estapor Venir is a voluptuous, sinful and downright sexy wine that burst all over your tastebuds like spicy, fruity depth charge. But it’s not something that many diners will have heard about before they sit down so education is key.
Last week Bibendum was very excited to welcome Wahaca staff into our office for a day of wine training. Amanda and Liz took the guys through all the wines on the list, with one eye on the menu and possible food matches. The Estapor Venir has just gone onto the Wahaca wine list and is rich and packed with red and black fruit and hints of chocolate. I think it would work well with a hearty, meaty dish like Pork Pibil or Mole. It has good fruit sweetness which means that it can stand up to chilli and spicier dishes. But don’t listen to me! Why don’t you listen to what the Wahaca guys thought?
Not only is it a great wine that celebrates Mexican produce, but it also has a great story. Produced using sustainable viticulture in the Guadalupe Valley in Baja California, Winemaker Hugo d’Acosta favours Zinfandel and Grenache which are particularly well adapted to the climate and need little intervention. With minimum use of chemicals and only natural fertilisers the vines are encouraged to form long roots and in some vineyards no irrigation is needed at all.
At the “Escuelita” winery, where Estapor is produced, Hugo has set up a non-profit winemaking school. His aim is to promote small-scale winemaking in the area by educating local people about winemaking traditions and teaching them winemaking skills, thereby providing a means of supporting themselves. Built on the site of a former olive oil production plant Hugo and Alejandro have tried to set an example by their own recycling. They have made extensive use of old bed and boxsprings, barrels, wine bottles, vineyard poles, irrigation hoses and plastic bottles by turning these into an art form. Old PET bottles are heated and pressed into layers to use as insulation in the walls and ceilings of new buildings. In time there are plans to make use of solar energy.
And if you’d like to hear what one of the wine trade’s most respected tasters had to say about it, here’s a quick interview with Steven Spurrier (of Decanter Magazine) at our Winestock Festival last year.
Thanks Dan, we’re looking forward to the next training already and look out for Estapor Venir on the menu.
Next week, as of 5th October, we will be introducing our winter menu with some exciting new additions to it. One of these new additions that we are really excited about is Spelt.
Spelt is an ancient grain which can be traced back 7000 years. A relative of wheat, it is higher in protein and was one of the first grains used to bake bread. Not unlike barley in texture, it is reputed to be helpful for those with wheat intolerances and IBS.
Wahaca is going to be using this organic british grown spelt from Sharpham Park which is grown and milled in small batches in the west country and is certified by the soil association. With it’s firm texture and nutty flavour, it makes a great addition to our salads.
We’ll be steaming ours with a little bit of vegetable stock and seasoning, and serving it up in our salads.
We are very excited to announce that the winner of our Street Art competition is the artist duo Claroscuro.
We have had incredible entries from some amazing artists and it has been a tough decision. Thank you all for entering but also for all those out there who voted.
Watch this space as Claroscuro starts putting together some fantastic ideas for the space – we hope to follow the whole commission here on the blog! We hope to see you all down in Canary Wharf once we open at the beginning of November.
We met the producer of this programme over margaritas at the Mexican Embassy last week while celebrating Mexican Independence Day. We’d love to do a culinary trip across Mexico like this but also we’re really excited that a programme like this is being done as just spreads the word more that there is SO much diversity to Mexican food.
The TV programme started on Monday 21st, Travel Channel, channel 251 on SKY and will continue every Monday at 9pm for the next 6 weeks. For anyone passionate about Mexican food and the different flavours and traditions across this vast country this should be a great show!
Next weeks show details!
“Charlie bites off more than he can chew in this sizzling hot romp across the Yucatan Peninsula. After tackling the world’s hottest chilli, our intrepid gastronome takes a tour of some of Mexico’s most visited sites like Chichen Itza and Ek Balam, before dropping in on a Mayan family to unearth an ancient recipe for buried pig. In the second half, we show you the secret, subterranean world of cenotes as Charlie dives through a breathtaking maze of underground rivers and cave systems. Finally, we head for the Caribbean and give you an exclusive look at some of the highlights of the Mayan Riviera.”
From Travel Channels Website. For more information on this series click here.
If you don’t have SKY (like me) then you will be able to buy the DVD on line soon.
in association with Watford Palace Theatre and Mercury Theatre Colchester present
2nd May 1997
by Jack Thorne
8 Sept – 10 Oct
We’ve teamed up with our great local theatre, the Bush, and hosted their press party last night which was a great success. We love everything about The Bush - it is a small but fantastic and inspiring establishment which is well worth many trips to. The Bush kindly gave us two tickets to give away to our loyal blog and twitter followers but if you don’t guess the correct amount of avocados we use each week then make sure you book tickets through their box office and we can suggest a great Mexican restaurant to visit after the play!
2nd May 1997. An historic victory. The Tories, 18 years in power, are defeated as New Labour sweeps into government. From the euphoria and despair, three deeply personal stories emerge.
Tory MP Robert prepares to attend the count. With defeat looming large, he fears becoming a forgotten man while his wife Marie counts the cost of her own sacrifice to politics. Lib Dem footsoldier Ian is no hero but party-crasher Sarah is determined to make him one. Best mates Jake and Will wake up to a new world order and try to memorise the cabinet before their politics A Level class. Jake dreams of Number 10. Will dreams of Jake.
A smouldering new play from one of Britain’s most exciting young writers about escaping the past, seizing the present and owning the future.
George Perrin (Sea Wall) directs a stunning cast including James Barrett, Geoffrey Beevers, Linda Broughton, Jamie Samuel, Hugh Skinner and Phoebe Waller-Bridge.
Please note that the performance contains smoking, nudity and some bad language.
We’ve had a great response to Tommi’s request for your Mexican recipes to go into her new book, Mexican Food Made Simple, and we are now closed for entries.
We’ve spent the last month collecting together your wild, wonderful and occasionally mind blowing recipe suggestions, so there’s lots of deliberation, cogitation and digestion to be done before we make our final choice of whose recipe will be published for the world see.
Watch this space for more from the British Chilli Revolution soon.
The British Museum opens the doors on September 24th for its final exhibition in the series on great leaders with an exhibition on Moctezuma the Aztec Ruler. For more information on the exhibition check out OLA London coming out in October with an interview between Ignacio Duran (cultural minister for Mexico in UK) and Colin McEwan (the curator).
Wahaca is really excited to be part of it with Tommi (our Executive chef) holding a demonstration and introduction to Mexican cooking, as well as a discussion with Fay Maschler of the Evening Standard.
For more information on the talk on Mexican food with Tommi and Fay Maschler click here and for Tommi’s demonstration and introduction to Mexican food on the 28th November click here.
Wahaca customers also get a £2 discount off their tickets – pick up a card in one of our restaurants which will explain how to redeem this (subject to availability).
Tickets are on sale – visit the British Museum’s website at www.britishmuseum.org or call the ticket line on +44 (0)20 7323 8181.
We had an amazing response to our graffiti competition with over five and a half thousand votes from around the world! Congratulations to everyone who entered. In some heats it was really close and we’re sad that only 10 can go through to the finals – but we’re not going to stop at Canary Wharf, so there’ll be more opportunities to decorate Wahaca soon!
Created with Admarket’sflickrSLiDR.
The finalists are:
Monica Alcazar
Morganic
Jon Erazo
Faye Chadburn
Irony
Luke Brabants
Claroscuro
Alfa
Pikto
Jimi Crayon
It’s now up to the management (feel free to try and influence their decision!) and we hope to announce the overall winner very soon.
Here’s the last set of artists looking for your votes. The winner of our graffiti contest will be invited to decorate the walls in our new Restaurant in Canary Wharf. Have a look through and cast your vote on which artist you think would be the best with our new place.
I’ve been doing graffiti/street art for 10 years now. I mainly do photorealistic art but I quite often like to combine it with stencil or abstract art. I love new challenges and know loads of techniques to transfer new ideas to large walls. I’ve done loads of airbrush jobs as well. Graffiti came to me as a way of expressing myself on a bigger canvas and is a way to show people that the art doesn’t always need to be inside the gallery. It can be everywhere.
Ria Dastidar aka Uberpup – makes imagery inspired by pop culture, nature, the urban environment, characters and fun. The work is playful, surreal and always uses distinctive intense color. Images take a mixed media approach, collage based, assembled digitally. The illustrations produced are often chaotic in style, unrestrained and contain a feeling of density and unbridled energy. Influences include, satirical comedy, Indian textiles, and day-glo cartoon shows. Contemporary illustrators are also very important to the Uber-style, especially Tado, Vault 49 and Genevieve Gauckler. Japanese art and anime is also an inspiration especially the artist Chiho Aoishima.
I am very inspired by architecture and my environment. When I used to paint in the streets I took certain environmental aspects with me into painting interiors and canvas… The way buildings interact with each other and the offsetting of sky colour against dark concrete and metal edges is integral to the similar structures that lie within my abstracts. Although based strongly on early graffiti paintings and graffiti colour schemes, my paintings rely on structure and form. Negative space is also a big factor in my work and I like to work out in my head what goes on outside of the actual painting as well as inside it.To make the innocent and beautiful dark, to find soul in stark, geometric swashes…
Growing up I was a fan of kids cartoons and comic books. As I got older and growing up in Brixton I became aware of the graffiti and advertisement that surrounded me in my urban environment. These things went on to influence my art, the blocks of solid colour, used in the cartoons, my use of line, like the comics. The more raw scruffier aspect of graffiti and the use of sexy young cool imagery used in advertisement.
Jimi Crayon recently exhibited work alongside Banksy, Rankin and Anthony Gormley in the extremely successful Art against Knives exhibition and was the first of all artist to sell his work raising money for the charity. He has customised shoes for Theirry Henry, and Elle Mcphearson and Immodesty Blaze are both collectors of his work. He is one of only 8 artist ever to paint onto the notoriously clean walls of MC&Saatchi’s London HQ and has also painted live murals at the Tate Modern on two occasions. He has shown work in London, Barcelona, Milan and New York and has featued heavily in the press from The Independent through to Vice magazine. Jimi is signed to Britain’s biggest Illustration agency ‘CIA’ working alonside the likes of Sir Peter Blake and Ian Bilbey. Jimi’s work has an enthuastic edge focussing on the vibrance and fun side of life not commonly found amongst his piers. “Arts in a weird place at present, its seems like everyone wants to immortalise the things they hate, you cant walk the streets without seeing stencils of guns, george bush or altered coca cola signs, It can be very patronising, I prefer thinking about the way I want things to go rather than the way I’d hate them to turn out.”
THE KRAH is a decrepit yet talented young man who has wasted most of his youth scribbling on everything and using any medium he could get his hands on. Brought up in the Mediterranean chaos of Europe’s most ancient city, ironically the one that gave birth to democracy. The KRAH was always fascinated by the urban disorder of his hometown of Athens Greece, where the priests are the richest men and the sunstroke makes the nation think that democracy still exists. As vandalism was the most fun thing to do, THE KRAH started painting the streets and the subway trains of Athens from 1997. But his graffiti and street-art also be seen on the streets of a lot of other citys around the world, all over Europe and cities such as Tokyo and Bangkok. After moving to East London The KRAH is still a very active street-artist and if graffiti is about underground freestyle funky visuals in illegal spots, THE KRAH has plenty of them to offer.
We are Agents Of Change – a group of 4 artists who work together to create artwork that blends and melds each of our individual styles into something unique. Our work is always site specific and we draw inspiration not only from the space to be painted but also it’s past, present and future. The attached piece was created in a gallery under renovation in east Berlin as part of a project to draw attention to the changes – good and bad- that the area and its population have experienced following the destruction of the wall.
I’ve been painting many years now.Both commercially and on the street. My recent work involves pylons and vegetation under the rough title of ‘urban nature’. I also recently painted the decor at the latitude festival. I’ve been described as bringing colour back to the streets and anything else I can get my paints, stickers and paste-ups on.
My artwork is brightly coloured and humourous, inspired by 1920’s art deco, 60’s psycadelia ,art noveau. My pieces always have a story to tell and I like the idea that the viewer can see something different in the picture each time they look and come away from the picture with a smile on their face (I know that sounds cheesy!). I often include organic elements, animals (and cakes!) in my pieces. My pieces are a mixture of hand made paper/ fabric collages cut up with a stanley knife and scissors before being scanned into Photoshop to reproduce as a print. I have recently added paintings to my portfolio too and these are large scale acrylics or household paints canvas and also as wall murals.
Now you’ve ssen the artists. Cast your vote. And don’t forget to check back soon to see who’s the winner of all 5 heats.
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