Wahaca

Events at Wahaca, News, Our News, Street Art, Uncategorized, Wahacos, What you say, What's Happening, Window to the Kitchen

Wahaca Covent Garden gets a facelift

After 5 years and almost a million and a half customers through its doors, our restaurant in Covent Garden is getting a facelift and will be closed from January 14th – 21st 2013.

Our architects have used special X-ray goggles to paint this picture of what our new stairway may look like

We’re particularly excited to be working with Nelio, a highly talented young French artist from the global street art scene, who is going to be bringing a fresh lick of paint and an installation piece to the restaurant. His work has been attracting a cult following around the world in recent years and it promises to be bursting with colour and energy.

Nelio will be bringing his beautifully vibrant work to Covent Garden

As well as some new street art, we’re also going to be installing a live plant wall that will bring some of our green credentials to life for everyone to admire. Our bar, which you have told us can get too busy in the evenings, is having an overhaul to make it more user-friendly for our bartenders and to help them get those drinks in your hands quicker. The same is true of our kitchen, which is having old equipment replaced with new, to make sure your food gets to you as quickly as it would in the markets of Mexico.

We're gonna need a pretty big watering can

We’ll be opening back up on the 21st January and would love to know what you think of our new surroundings, so please do get in touch. To keep up to date with how our work is progressing over in Covent Garden, check out facebook.com/wahaca or follow us on twitter.com/wahaca.

If you were planning a trip to Wahaca Covent Garden when we’ll be closed, fear not – Our Soho and Southbank restaurants are only 5 minutes away.

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Guerilla Chilli Growing, News, Our News, Staff observations, Uncategorized, Wahacos, What's Happening

From tiny seeds, spicy plants might grow (if we all keep our fingers crossed)

We’re not particularly renowned for our green fingered attributes in the Wahaca head office. The one thing we do have however is access to a lot of chilli seeds. So, this week, we’ve seized upon the recent bout of good weather and have started up a little chilli growing competition in our secret Soho hideaway.

We’ll keep you posted on how things go over the coming months, but for now, here are a couple of photos of how we got started.

For a small pot, could there be a little overcrowding going on?

You can just tell Oli's done this before. But will his 3 seed approach pay off?

Of course, like any wannabe chilli grower, we didn’t even think about touching a trowel until we’d watched the incredibly informative musings of our very own chilli expert and his series of videos, which you can find on this very blog.

The line up. The head office's pots, complete with specially commisioned plastic greenhouses.

Keep your fingers crossed for some green shoots of success poking through the soil soon. The hot money’s on Katie from accounts, but at this stage, it’s anyone’s game.

If you’re growing chillies and have some tips for us, or would like to leave some words of encouragement, please get in touch by leaving a comment below.

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Cocktails, Contributor Competitions, Events at Wahaca, Food & Drink, Food Topics & Trends, Learn at Wahaca, News, Our News, Uncategorized, What's Happening

Do you want to be on our tequila tasting panel?

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.

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Events at Wahaca, News, Our News, Uncategorized, What's Happening

Wahaca at the Sustainable City Awards

Last week, we went along to meet the Lord Mayor at the Sustainable City Awards, and were delighted to come away with an award in the Sustainable Food category, and be shortlisted in the slightly less glamorous (but no less important) Sustainable Waste Management category.

Thank you very much to all of the judges who thought that our work to refurbish our new Wardour Street restaurant was worthy of a mention amongst all of the top companies who were also shortlisted.

Since joining the Sustainable Restaurant Association we have become more and more committed to running a sustainable restaurant, which as Lucy Siegle says in the latest edition of OLA London, isn’t so easy. It’s recognition like this that keeps us motivated to make sure our business is minimising the impact it has on the environment around us – A bit like the market stalls that originally inspired us. Which we think is kindda nice.

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Events at Wahaca, News, Our News, Uncategorized, What's Happening

Wahaca comes to Soho

It’s been quite a journey over the last 6 months turning 80 Wardour Street from a local boozer, into the 4th member of the Wahaca family. There’s been plenty of fun and games along the way, and we can hardly believe we’re saying it, but with a massive grin we’re happy to declare Wahaca Soho OPEN.

There have certainly been some highlights.

Since our first table went up in July we knew this place was going to be a bit special. Building site chic was never going to last though.

When we lost one of our pigs back in September, with a bit of help from our facebook fans, the lovely Catty found it sniffing out its new home! It was a total sty back then.

We soon realised that style is the name of the game in Soho. We thought that the new place would appreciate its own T-shirt, so its own T-shirt it would have. And not just any T-shirt, oh no, a competition winning T-shirt. We asked you lot to get to work and send us a design that brought to life the spirit of Wahaca. Over 50 local designers and Photoshop-savvy folk from around the country had a go, and it was no easy task selecting a winner. In the end we chose a design by Matt Burke, who is none-other than Head of Art, just down the road at Addiction London. They can now add the honour of Wahaca T-shirt designers to the growing list of accolades. Matt’s going to be a pretty regular feature in the new restaurant. His prize was a year’s worth of free food at 80 Wardour Street.

Artistic talent has been hanging around the site in hoards in the past few weeks, and to name just a few we were delighted to invite Remi/Rough in to graffiti the place.

Whilst Barton Hargreaves spent months circling Soho with his camera so he could build the montages which you’ll see climbing our bare-brick walls.

Jose was put to work constructing our foosball tables, which have already seen some seriously close-fought battles down in our tequila bar. Surely with 2 tables to practice on someone will be able to take on the mighty Hassan at Wahaca Canary Wharf.

Nate, a familiar face from Wahaca Covent Garden, has been hard at work with the new bar team – training them on the list of over 20 top class 100% agave tequilas and turning our basement into the best tequila bar in the town, and the perfect place to enjoy some of our new cocktails.

In fact, we’ve not made it easy on ourselves. From Wahaca’s very beginnings we wanted to minimise the impact we make on the environment and community around us. So throughout the build we have done everything possible to keep our waste levels down. In fact 90% of all rubbish generated from the building work has been recycled. You might notice that the wooden floors from the old Slug and Lettuce are now our ceiling, walls and bar (Don’t worry we made sure we gave them a good clean). And we’ve put plenty of clever little things in place to continue that commitment as the restaurant does its thing. Hidden in a back room are a handy glass crusher, and cardboard bailer that help make recycling easier. Two weeks ago the last arrangements were made so that now 100% of the restaurants’ waste will be recycled, we’re very proud to say that nothing from our Soho site will be going to landfill.

And now after some tremendous effort from so many marvellous people it’s time for us to stop talking about it, get the doors wide open and hand this restaurant over to you. We hope you like it.

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News, Our News, Street Art, Uncategorized, What's Happening

Remi/Rough gets to work in Soho

With our new restaurant on Wardour Street in Soho fast approaching completion, one of the last tasks is to get someone to splash a bit of paint on the walls. You know, make it look nice.

In fact, local residents and inquisative passers by may have noticed that there’s been quite a bit of that going on, and we’ll give you the full low down on all of the artists that worked on the interior soon. But today, it was the turn of Remi Morgan or Remi/Rough (to those in the know) and we thought he deserved special mention due to his recent involvement in the often whispered about, but until yesterday never reported, Underbelly Project.

Thanks to Vandalog for the images via flickr and creative commons.

Remi was one of 100 of the worlds top street artists that was invited to take part in a one off art project, deep under the heart of New York City in a dissused and now totally un-accessible subway station. The space was transformed into a exhibition to which only one reporter and a handful of photographers were invited, and which was only on show for one night. Pretty Cool.

When we asked him about it in a break from graffiting our bar, Remi mostly recalled the fear of being eaten by mutant sized rats, and the pitch black that perpetuated the space. With this in mind, we’ve left the lights on for him and you’ll be pleased to hear he’s doing a cracking job.

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