This weekend, together with The Embassy of Mexico in the UK, we’re celebrating Mexico’s Children’s Day with 2 days of free workshops and activities for children and families at the V&A’s Museum of Childhood.
Saturday 27th and Sunday 28th April sees a whole programme of activities for you and your little ones to get involved with as well as a voucher to grab a free children’s meal from our brand new children’s menu any time in the next 2 months.
Activities include storytelling, Mexican toy painting, piñata making, mask and face painting and Mexican dancing. So enough fun to keep any little person entertained for the whole day. By all accounts, it should be pretty swell.
Our new children’s menu launched in all of our restaurants today and gives little people the chance to explore the Mexican market too, with specially selected dishes that aren’t spicy, but still full of flavour and wholesome goodness. Kids can choose from a choice of quesadillas, mini burritos or fish tacos, a side dish and a drink all for just £5.
For details of how to get there and what time the events kick off, just head to the Museum’s website.
Following a flurry of excitement amongst our facebook fans, we are now looking for an exclusive panel of 5 tequila experts from amongst you lot, the followers of our facebook, blog and twitter pages, to join us for a tequila tasting with a difference, to be held at Wahaca Soho on Wednesday 23rd February 2011 at 6.30pm.
Do you know your agave from your auto-clave, your piña from your pot still? What on earth would you do with a Tahona Stone?
If you would like to join this tasting, send an email to ola@wahaca.co.uk explaining in no more than 100 words why you are qualified to help us select the next top tequilas that will be featured on our bar list. The deadline for entries is the end of Monday 20th February, so get cracking.
On the night, we’ll taste a range of tequilas which have been sent to us by the Mexican Tequila Board that aren’t available outside of North America. They’ve kindly searched out 30 top quality tequilas from Mexico’s smaller distilleries just for us. It’s not just for fun though, at the end of the tasting, we’ll pick out 4 favourites, which will be appearing as guest tequilas in our bar over the next year. We’re hoping that by putting them on our list, we’ll help to introduce these brands to the international market, and their amazing products can start to be shared with the world.
The tasting will start at 6.30 with a cocktail to get us in the mood, then it’s down to the serious business of choosing our top tequilas. The tasting will be led by the all-knowing tequila aficionado Henry Besant, who will help guide us through a range of platas, reposados and añejos and will finish at about 8pm.
Don’t get confused, this is not the same event that is being organised by QYPE (That’s one’s going to be just as good though!) This one is just for all you Wahaca fans out there in the world-wide-webernet. (If you’re looking for the Qype event, head over to their page for details).
We’ll look forward to hearing why you think you’ve got what it takes to help choose our next favourite tequilas. Those still looking for a worm in the bottom of their bottle need not apply.
We were really excited to be contacted by Tristan Manco, author and general force-for-street-art-good, who let us know about the launch of his new book, Street Sketchbook – Journeys.
In the book Tristan explores the secret world of sketchbooks by tracing artists creative journeys, from the initial idea to its development. He features work by the most innovative street and graffiti artists from around the world, and unsurprisingly it contains a large proportion of work from the growing number of Mexican artists pushing the boundaries of street art, both in the UK and at home in Mexico.
To find out more and see a selection of the work from the artists featured, including Daniel Acosta, Daniel Berman and Uriel Marin, check out the exhibition running at the Pictures on Walls gallery, 46 – 48 Commercial Street, from Friday 1st October 6pm. For full details, check out their events page.
If you do go along, we’d love to hear what you think – just leave a comment below.
I had a fine time at the Aldeburgh Food Festival the weekend before last. The sun came out in all its glory (lovely for us punters, not so great for the farmers) and I had the fortune to discover the unfathomably delicious fruit cream ices made by Alder Tree. These ice creams are so packed full of fruit like gooseberry and elderflower, rhubarb and ginger, and my favourite of all of them, the summer fruits, that they are not technically allowed to call themselves ice cream. Hence the lovely old fashioned name fruit ices. They seriously reminded me of my childhood…these ices are just like the ones my granny used to make using home grown fruits, cream, sugar and not much more. Delicious.
I was at the Aldeburgh Food Festival demo-ing a few simple recipes using the glut of tomatoes that crop up towards the end of every September. I had a great time making a chilli and tomato jam and fideus, a delectable noodle dish from Veracruz using some local Cromer crab but the real highlight was cooking with the Orford Primary School. Thanks to the enthusiasm and passion of Louise Holland, Jamie Oliver’s manager, the Orford Primary School have a garden where they are taught about growing vegetables, and then how to cook them. Mark Hix and I were sous-chefs to four jubilant kids who barely reached my tummy-button but were nonetheless showing a tent packed with people how to make pizza from scratch. The morning was a total treat and inspiring to see how much children love to cook and eat vegetables when they are involved in the magic of how vegetables are planted and how they grow. If only there were more projects like this up and down the country, kids would learn to love real food again, obesity levels would plummet and the NHS would heave a sigh of relief – wishful thinking maybe but surely not impossible?
Wow – we’ve had so many fantastic entries to our graffiti competition that we’re going to have to spread voting over an entire week! Each day we will post 10 entries and at the end of the week the top 2 from each post will go through to the final judgment by our management team.
Here are the first 10 entries, but remember to keep looking back and voting every day this week.
I am a Mexican who has been living here for 6 years, creating cross-cultural multi-disciplinary art. I am always drawn to the images that our cities hold and the stories behind them; from finding an old woman sewing a hat for Semana Santa while taking the sun in a small street in Seville, to the cherry blossoms on Hackney Road during the arrival of Springtime, or the busy commuters in Euston train station struggling with each other on the hottest day of London’s summer.
Artistic mark making and its creation is the most natural and intuitive instinct that I have at my disposal. Drawing inspirations from both rural & urban environments, I attempt to project into spaces, the techno-organic free flowing formations of curvaceous-linear marks that are prominent within nature.
I then endeavour to offset this with the surrounding metropolitan/industrial landscape. This is conveyed by a format of biomechanical, angle-poised geometric shapes.
My aim is to balance these contrasting factions showing the intricate qualities both environments have to offer, colliding into
a free-style colourfull abstract final outcome. Hopefully unaffected by any preconceived notions the viewer may have.
Influential Artists Include: H.R Geiger, M.C Escher, Salvador Dali, Roger Dean, Francis Bacon, Wes Wilson, Mucha & Andy Warhol.
+Graffiti Artists: Craola, 0ly Bleach, 0.Two, Seak, Seen, D*Face, Jeremy Fish, Alexone, Fybeone and Das Mudwig.”
i much prefer painting large spaces. big is best :] i like the idea of my characters invading, populating and taking over spaces. i am inspired by comics, cartoons and toys. by the 80s, bright colours and kitch. by tattoo art and by everyday life. i try to not let life get in the way of drawing daily..
Last year I painted a large wall piece. Moving away from the canvas was very liberating and now that my big show is over I plan on painting much more on walls and getting away from the comfort of my studio. I actually spent a year in Oaxaca after graduating from university. It was there that I began painting full-time, studying in the La Universidad de Bellas Artes.
I have been going to Mexico all my life because two of my siblings were brought up there. I also have a Mexican uncle and Mexican cousins on my mother’s side. I feel a very strong connection to that country, specifically Oaxaca of course, the arts capital of Mexico. I think the Latino influence is quite obvious in my paintings and South American people always comment on it.
His work is a mixture of organic images / patterns , art influences , graffiti / street art and computer design where the name comes from .(#c0defc is code for a colour in hexadecimal cyfers coming from his tag “ code “ and his initials FC )
The painting often escapes the usual square boundary of a canvass to be applied on to everyday objects found in skips sometimes left abandoned using concrete / silicon , installed in places as ” illegal public art “/ “performances” as if the whole process was more an activity to transform society’s waste into art using public spaces as galleries.
His graffiti / street art work is now mostly based on specific projects usually carried out in different countries mixing the site specific characteristic with recurrent subjects mostly based on cinematic symbols describing the artist background.
After a decade of active graffiti writing and global exploration my work has become strongly site specific.
I treat each location differently. I choose a design that harnesses the potential I see in each space. I enjoy tongue in cheek transformation. Turning things upside down, I put them on their head. By breaking down barriers through simply iconography I am accessible to the masses. I change peoples perception of the world around them. My humour is sophisticated, yet playful. There is lots to absorb, while being bold and simply pleasing to the eye. Lets make sweet music.
To understand a bit about Pure Evil it is illuminating to know that he is a descendant of Sir Thomas More, the Lord Chancellor who wrote the controversial work Utopia and who was later beheaded by King Henry VIII. With this busy background (Sir Thomas was later canonised) it is only natural that Pure Evil should explore the darker side of the wreckage of Utopian dreams and the myth of the Apocalypse, a belief in the life-changing event that brings history with all its conflicts to an end.
In 1990 PURE EVIL left the Poll Tax Riots of London behind and went to live in California where he spent 10 years ingesting weapons grade psychedelics , thinking about stuff , making electronic music and printing t-shirts . Inspired by skateboard culture and the west coast character graffiti of Twist he returned to London and picked up a spraycan and started painting weird fanged vampire bunnies everywhere.
8. Infected By Design
Because of my OCD and an over-active imagination, my artwork comes out in many different forms, but is always the result of having to get every line painstakingly neat! I take inspiration from everything around me, yet at the same time, it’s almost like sometimes I don’t want to take in anything from the world outside, lest it should influence my art, which I try to create purely from my mind. I would love this opportunity to show the world what it means to be ‘Infected By Design’.
To be the best ‘me’ I can be is what causes my inspiration as an artist because it keeps my eyes and mind open, aware of myself, aware of others, aware of the possibility of art, and aware of the essential combination which is life itself. Life and art are inseparable and I’d like to share my experience of this cohesion with the world in a positive and unifying way.
10. Emiliano Mendieta-Band
I’m what we call a brit-mex, that is half british half mexican, and my work goes around this mixed identity, my life experiences and the places I’ve lived in. I was born close to the day of the death and this has been one of the main subjects of my work, death as a source of life and a connection with your past, the story that makes you who you are. I look forward using the space as something that creates an atmosphere rather than just using the wall as a flat surface, floors and roofs can be used as well as the use of papel picado to create something more interesting, something that embraces you rather than something flat on the wall.
Now you’ve seen all the entries, cast your vote on which you think would look best in Wahaca Canary Wharf. You can only vote once on each heat, so be careful who you chose and look out for the next set of entries over the next few days.
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