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Wahaca at The British Street Food Awards

The 15th – 16th September sees the return of the British Street Food Awards and as part of this year’s prize for the vendor who scoops the “Best of the best” award, our very own Tommi and Mark, are going to be helping out with their best advice on growing their burgeoning street food emporium into a mini fleet, (if of course that’s what the winner would like to do).

In fact Tommi is also on the judging panel helping to decide who from this year’s clutch of newcomers is cooking up the best street food in Britain.

There will be a head to head cook-off of all of the finalists who have been specially selected by a nationwide team of food journalists and bloggers, so standards are set to be high. Tommi will be joined at the judges table by Gizzi Erskine, Yianni Papoutsis and Fay Ripley with Richard Johnson keeping them all in line. To give you a flavour of what went on at last year’s awards, check out their video from Harvest at Jimmy’s.

The British Street Food Awards will be happening alongside 2 boozy @tweatup events, Ginstock and Rumstock on the cobbled streets of East London, outside Jamie Oliver’s Fifteen restaurant. It’s set to draw an extraordinary fleet of vans, trucks and trailers to the area as well as live music, art and bunting. If you want to find out more information or grab yourself a ticket, then head to www.fifteenstreet.co.uk

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

The Wahaca Southbank Experiment

We’ve not tried anything like this before. It’s not how restaurants usually get built. But that’s what makes it fun, right?

At the beginning of July, we’re going to be opening a new Wahaca perched next to Southbank Centre alongside Waterloo Bridge. This isn’t the kind of opportunity that comes up every day and we wanted to make sure we do this iconic site justice. So this won’t be like a Wahaca restaurant you’ve seen before.

To start, we’re not building it from bricks and mortar. Wahaca Southbank will be built from 8 recycled shipping containers, which our architects have designed to fit together on 2 storeys with a cantilevered hanging bar space allowing for 130 hungry people.

Raising the bar

Our 8 shipping containers have been modified to create a series of interlinked open spaces and include panoramic windows offering some pretty stunning views of the river and the passing parade of people, boats, royalty etc.

Keeping it fresh. A work in progress

Wahaca Southbank will be a chance for you to try out some new dishes. Tommi has already been up to her elbows in new recipes specifically for this site following our recent trip to Mexico and LA, and she will also be joined by guest chefs, invited to help develop other new dishes for the Southbank menu. We’re thinking of this as a development kitchen. The dishes that you tell us you like the most will be added to our menu in our other restaurants. We like to think it’ll help us to keep things fresh.

We’ve also got a bit more experimental with our decoration. We’ve been working with Tristan Manco, general worldwide authority on all things street art, who’s hooked us up with some amazing artists who will be flying in from Mexico City and around the world to graffiti the space, creating an evolving work of art that will be updated as the mood takes us and the seasons change.

What we'll look like. With a few sketches by graffiti artist Saner.

One thing we always like to know when opening a restaurant is how long it’ll be around for. But that’s also a little up in the air. You see, Southbank Centre have invited us to join them as part of this summer’s Festival of the World, a 3 month-long celebration of art instillations and events. They’ve said we can stay for as long as it takes them to decide what to do with the space next, which could be 18 months, or it could be longer. But that’s the clever bit you see. When we do move on, we just pick these shipping containers up, and set them up somewhere else. The Wahaca experiment will move on, opening up for new people, introducing new art and design and new dishes to a new community. So please come and get involved with our experiment. We hope you’ll like the results.

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Contributor Competitions, Events at Wahaca, History & Heritage, News, Our News, Uncategorized, Wahacos, What's Happening

Free tequila? It must be Day of the Dead

From Tuesday 2nd to Thursday 4th November, we’re celebrating Day Of The Dead at Wahaca, with a free glass of tequila for everyone. Not just any tequila either – It’s our brand spanking new, multi-award winning house pour, El Tesoro Reposado that’s on offer to anyone sensible enough to realise that tequila doesn’t have to mean a wincing face and a morning of regret. Oh no, this stuff is good. There will also be plenty of our home made sangrita available (That’s the nice spiced tomato and orange juice that’s every tequilas favourite sidekick).

If you’re not sure what Day Of The Dead is all about, it’s one of our favourite Mexican festivals and worth checking out. It coincides with all saints and all souls day and in Mexico it’s a way of celebrating the lives of friends and family who have died. It sounds like it would be quite a sombre affair, but not a bit of it. Any excuse for a party eh!

We’ll also be giving you the chance to win a signed copy of Tommi’s book each day of our celebrations – To enter you need to fold up one of our origami skulls (that you’ll find in the centrefold of our new Ola London) and upload a photo of yourself to our facebook page. We’ll pick our favourite each day who will be the happy recipients of a book so they can recreate those Mexican masterpieces themselves at home.

So if you fancy a bit of a knees up, and want to get your hands on some of the world’s best tequila, (yes we think it’s that good), then come along from Tuesday 2nd to Thursday 4th November.

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Events at Wahaca, Food & Drink, News, Our News, Recipes & Cooking Tips, Uncategorized, What's Happening

Wahaca goes tweet for Avocado week

We’re really excited to be taking part in the worlds first tweet-along to support Avocado week and all those wonderful people at the Avocado brotherhood.

On Tuesday evening Tommi will be taking part in a head-to-head cook off with Tom Parker Bowles outside our (soon to be open) site on Wardour Street in Soho. So if you’re in the area, come along and check it out. You might even be able to try the dishes if you’re very lucky.

But if you can’t come along, then don’t worry. The idea of a tweet-along is that you can follow their progress live on twitter and cook the recipes yourself from the comfort of your own kitchen. Just follow twitter.com/wahaca or twitter.com/avacadobrother from 7pm on Tuesday, we’ll both be tweeting the recipes as they are cooked, and you can get get stuck in. We’d love to find out how you get on.

You can try cooking either recipe, and the details of the ingredients you’ll need are shown below (No bias, of course, but surely you’ll be cooking Tommi’s recipe, won’t you?!). For full details about the tweetalong and avocado week, check out the avocado brotherhood blog

Thomasina’s chicken, avocado and basil salad with yoghurt and garlic dressing

2 Chicken breasts poached or roast chicken left from the weekend, torn into pieces
1 Hass avocado, sliced
8 baby tomatoes, halved or quartered
A small handful green beans, cooked to al dente
10 small jersey potatoes, steamed for 20 mins (optional)
1 small bunch of basil, leaves picked
2 handfuls of mixed salad leaves
Olive oil
Crostini bread
Juice of ½ lemon
200g Low fat Greek yoghurt
1tbsp Low fat crème fraiche
1 small clove garlic, crushed
½ tsp Dijon mustard
Pinch of sweet paprika
½ tbsp parsley, chopped (optional)
Small squeeze of lemon juice and extra virgin olive oil
Salt and pepper

Tom Parker Bowles’ Lime marinated prawn and avocado pittas

400 g small Atlantic prawns, peeled
4 Hass avocados, mashed
2 red onions, finely chopped
Pinch, sea salt
Small bunch of coriander, chopped
6 birds eye chillies, chopped/or half a Habenero if you want real heat/ or a couple of standard green chillies if you really can’t face heat/finely chopped
1 lime, juiced
Fresh black pepper
6 mini pittas
2 limes, juiced
Big glug Tabasco
Sprinkle sea salt
Pepper

If you’re going to get involved, we’d love to hear about it so please let us know by leaving your comments below. Don’t forget to buy your ingredients and have them well prepped so you don’t get left behind on the night.

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Food & Drink, News, Our News, Recipes & Cooking Tips, Wahacos, Window to the Kitchen

Recipe Testing for Winter Menu

Our new menu is set to go live towards the beginning of October so we were testing some new dishes in the White City kitchen the other day. There were a few things we were playing with.

Vegetable Taco

For our seasonal vegetable taco we were debating whether to go back to the savoy cabbage/ mushroom mix that we’ve had before. Or trying it with seasonal greens (spring greens at the moment). Firstly we made a rich chilli sauce with ancho chilli’s, which have a slightly sweeter flavour than the pasilla chilli’s we have used previously. Then we cooked off our veg on the flat top and mixed it with the chilli sauce.

It has quite a meaty taste to it, thanks to the mushrooms and the rich ancho sauce.

Chilli Squash Winter Burrito

We used fresh butternut squash which we dice, mix with a little cumin and our home made mojo de ajo (a potent garlic concoction) and roast it in the oven. Really delicious in a vegetarian burrito.

Black Bean Tostada

The black bean tostada omes from our intense love of our frijoles and black beans. It’s such a simple snack, but so delicious. In our first attempt, we took a tostada (fried pure corn tortilla) topped it with some frijoles, shredded lettuce, salsa fresca, crema, and Lancashire cheese.

It was a very tasty combo, but perhaps not the most attractive looking tostada. Especially since I was a little over generous with the frijoles and it started oozing over the sides.

The second more attractive attempt created by Tommi and Gavin, utilised our whole black beans, and corn, which gave it some welcome texture and a meatier, more robust consistency.

Our next step is testing different MSC approved seasonal fish for the menu – something we are really passionate about and keen to get right. If you’ve got a point of view on what we’re up to let us know by leaving a comment.

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