Calling all Mexican football fans!! The best summer entertainment is nearly here…

To celebrate the World Cup and to show its support for the Mexican team, Wahaca is giving free food to all who wear a Mexican football shirt on the days of the Mexican matches.

All you have to do is come to Wahaca on either of Mexico’s big match dates, wear the real Mexican football shirt and enjoy free food at Wahaca on us!

Dates for the Mexico Matches kick off with South Africa on Friday 11th June, France on Thursday 17th June and Uruguay Tuesday 22nd June. We look forward to seeing you on these days.

This is a great opportunity to try some of our new dishes from wahaca’s summer menu. Highlights from the new menu include grilled cactus tacos with courgette and cheese, as well as the Chile Relleno – a mouth watering softened chile ancho, stuffed with refried beans and topped with a sweetening mix of caramelised onions, fresh thyme and sour cream.

terms & conditions

This offer will only run during the World Cup Matches on 11th/17th/22nd June.

There will be no screening of the match at Wahaca

Complimentary food is offered only to those wearing authentic Mexican football shirts, on days that Mexico play.

No drink is included in this offer.

It will be the managers discretion as to how much complimentary food each person orders (if they feel this offer is being abused).

Restaurants

Covent Garden, 66 Chandos Place, London WC2N 4HG

Westfield, 1074 Westfield Shopping Centre, Ariel Way, Lodnon W12 7GB

Canary Wharf, Park Pavillion, 40 Canada Square, Canary Wharf, London E14 5FW

Opening times

1200-2300 Monday – Saturday

1200-2200 Sunday

Join us on Tuesday 9th March from 1pm in Canada Place Crossroads in Canary Wharf’s mall for a chance to meet Thomasina Miers and get an exclusive signed copy of her new book “Mexican Food Made Simple.”

“A world away from Tex-Mex sizzling fajitas with cheesy nachos, Thomasina Miers, former MasterChef champ and Wahaca restaurant founder, is bringing a large slice of genuine Mexico to the mainstream” The Independent

To mark the occasion, Wahaca will be giving away delicious guacamole and chips fresh from their restaurant in The Park Pavilion, Canada Square.

Hope to see you there!

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Opening today! Wahaca is proud to open its first Cocktail & Mezcal Bar serving a list of delicious Wahaca cocktails as well as our favourite Mezcals & Tequila, Mexican beers, wines, refreshing Aqua Frescas and snacks such as our Tortilla chips with freshly made Guacamole. Come visit us soon!

With views out over Canada Square Park, the cocktail & Mezcal bar is located on the second floor of the Park Pavilion – just above the wahaca restaurant. With a Mexican table football, swing chairs and a living plant wall that creates a vibrant, buzzy and unique spot for after work drinks.

A little information on Mezcal
Heralded as the “elixir of the Gods” Mezcal is the best kept secret to be smuggled out of the Americas in the last 20 years.  Mezcal comes from the maguey or agave plant which is grown mainly in Oaxaca.  There is a saying in Oaxaca “para todo mal, mezcal…y para todo bien tambien” (for everything bad there is Mezcal…and also for everything good).  Mezcal has a wonderful smoky/ peaty texture to rival the best Scottish Malts. The flavour comes from the agave plant being baked in huge pits in the ground.  The plants are then crushed to extract their rich, sugary juices.  Tequila is a form of Mezcal and comes from the Blue Agave plant (there are hundreds of different varieties of Agave plant) and has a smoother, less smoky taste. Wahaca’s tequilas are all 100% Blue agave and taste of vanilla, caramel and peppers.  Both plants need to sunbathe for up to 12 years before they have soaked up enough solar energy to produce the sugars to make the alcohol….so drinking them is like drinking sunshine in a bottle!

For all those that have ever had a bad night out on Tequila, we challenge you to discover the real thing at Wahaca.  With no impurities and made from 100% agave they are 100% delicious. Wahaca’s cocktails blend the best of our mezcals and tequilas with other Mexican flavours like tamarind, lime, hibiscus, grapefruit and mint.

For wahaca recipes – click here and here to visit some blog posts with some of our favourite recipes from Sammi.

Do you have any suggestions for Sammi? Let us know any ideas for some of your favourite cocktails and you may have your very own cocktail on our menu soon!

Photos taken by Amy Murrell

Last week we invited a group of Burrito lovers down to Canary Wharf to give us feedback on Wahaca’s burritos as we start to plan the take-away menu to launch in March. We had fun but also got some really helpful advice.

We started off doing a tasting of all the burritos we serve at the restaurant. We usually toast our burritos like the photo above but for take-away we are going to have to leave it with a soft tortilla so we wanted to see how they fare. Luckily we got some positive feedback on the soft tortilla burritos although there were a few who tried it toasted for the first time and really loved it!

Here is some feedback from our Burrito tasters:

“It was great to try the range of burritos at Wahaca and I was surprised by just how nice the toasted ones tasted! I was also very impressed by the hottest of the salsas. Usually I go for the chicken option so this tasting session was an ideal opportunity for me to try the other meats. The slow-cooked pork was particularly nice but sorry, pickled onions are not for me!”

Mark Jansen from London Burrito

“The slow-cooked pork burrito was heaven in a tortilla! The incredibly tasty shredded pork paired very nicely with fantastically zingy pickled onions and habanero chillies. Spicy!”

Elizabeth Dunne (AKA @eBeth)

“I really loved all the burritos – and it’s truly a tough choice for my favourite – but if I had to pick just one, I think I’d go with the char-grilled steak. Beefy, juicy and with the spice just right, I savored every bite.”

Chris Osburn from The Londonist

“It was really nice to see how much thought was going in to the takeaway burritos; if only I worked near the Canary Wharf branch! It was also good to have our suggestions trialled on the spot, and I think the final chicken burrito was much better for it. You were all very open to suggestions, as well as the decisions behind every aspect of the restaurant, particularly about the question of guacamole in the burritos. A tonne of avocados a week is rather a lot.”

Edd Hannay (AKA Burrito Safari)

The last bits were the most fun as we started playing with some ideas. Firstly we used a bit of Chipotle butter on a soft pork burrito – just brushed a little on the inside of the tortilla. The idea being to add some flavour to the edges of the tortilla. This was too naughty, too filling and just too much… for most of us but then a few thought it was just heaven.

I would definitely fall asleep at my desk if i had one of these for lunch… verdict was that it wasn’t right but a fun thing to try!

Next was Simon and Gail’s feedback on our chicken burrito as they sent Tommi back to the kitchen with some instructions and recommendations! Rather than using our Chicken tinga, which is a traditional Mexican recipe, they wanted us to use the grilled chicken with a tomato salsa to make it more fresh tasting. (Click here for Gail’s great blog)

Tommi came back with a delicious creation which did taste a whole lot fresher and has got us thinking further about how we can improve it… watch this space!

Thanks to everyone for coming along. For other perspectives have a look at these three posts:

One Million Gold Stars
Londonist
London Burrito

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We hope your little chilli pots have survived the cold Christmas and you have a nice little chilli plant growing! Its time to come and show us how you’re doing, perhaps get some advice or share notes with the team at Canary Wharf Wahaca, who have been growing their own plants too.

Visit us this January with your pot and enjoy a free Guacamole & Tortilla Chips from us. If you missed out on the chilli pots do not worry! Pop into Wahaca and we will give you some of our Serrano chilli seeds and some tips on how to grow them.

Bring some heat and spice into your life over the cold months at Wahaca!

(This is only available to those who received a Little Chilli Give Away Pot, the free Guacamole & Tortilla chips are to be enjoyed in the restaurant alongside a meal and only at the Canary Wharf Wahaca restaurant).

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I think sometimes we forget our roots and we just immerse ourselves in our lives and take everything for granted.

After living in London for more than 9 years now, I think this is the first Christmas when I have really missed the festive season in Mexico.

I wanted to tell you about a few of the things I love about Christmas at home in Mexico.

To start with we have the “posadas” witch means “shelter” that are held in neighbourhoods around Mexico. This celebration recreates Mary and Joseph’s search for a place to stay in Bethlehem and are held from 16th of December to the 24th of December.

The celebration consists of a procession with candles, sometimes with individuals selected to play the parts of Mary and Joseph, or sometimes images are carried. The procession will make its way to a particular home (a different one each night), where a special song is sung. In this song those outside the house sing the part of Joseph asking for shelter and the family inside responds singing the part of the innkeeper saying that there is no room. The song switches back and forth a few times until finally the innkeeper decides to let them in. The door is opened and everyone goes inside.

Then the hosts give the guests food, usually tamales and a hot drink – like ponche or atole. Then there are piñatas and the children are given candy.

I remember doing this for many years in my grandparents house, we were a big family at that time living all close to each other plus we would have different posadas every day with a different neighbour! A never ending celebration, with so much food and drinks… just imagine how we would end up like for New Year…!

I remember my favourite Christmas were always with my grandparents, we all used to get together on the 24th from lunch time, my grandma would cook for all of us (around 20 of us!), then at night we will go to the church with my granpa, then come back drink some ponche and dance some salsa, I used to hate dancing but now I actually like it. We would then have a feast of my grandma’s cooking romeritos, mole, chicken achiote and spaghetti (Mexican style!). At that point we drank, we ate, we went to the church… but the most exciting part were the presents! We all used to exchange presents and I used to get full of clothes… not very exciting but still very nice. I think my best Christmas was when I got an electric guitar, I never knew how to use it though.

All the family used to stay overnight and Santa would come overnight. So you can imagine all my cousins at 5am waking up everybody showing off our new toys!

People say that good memories stay forever and that these are the treasures of human kind, I hope you enjoy this treasure!

Feliz Navidad y prospero año nuevo.

Julio

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Last night Mark and Tommi accepted on behalf of Wahaca the award for Discovery – for a restaurant pushing the boundaries in its style of cuisine. The 6 awards were judged and chosen by a foodie panel including Fay Maschler, Giles Coren, Tom Parker Bowles and Charles Campion. We were really excited to be part of this inaugural festival and look forward to doing more and more with it over the next few years. Thanks to everyone who voted for us.

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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?

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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’s flickrSLiDR.

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.

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*to send her your recipes…

I have been learning so much about chillies from Mexicans, fellow food lovers and general chilli nuts that I thought it would be a fun, if slightly mad-capped idea to publish someone’s best ever Mexican recipe which uses chilli in my cookbook, ‘Mexican Food Made Simple’ , due out next April.

The idea is that anyone out there in cyberspace sends me their favourite Mexican recipe using chilli.  The recipe has to be easy to follow, not too complicated and use ingredients that you can get in the UK (even if that means sending off for a Mexican chilli by mail order).  If the recipe is good enough, the winning recipe goes into my book (as judged by Hodder, my publisher, some mystery chefs and me), whilst if there is a runner-up, they will be published in Wahaca’s “Ola London”, which we hand out to 10,000 people a week at Wahaca and several hundred journalists.

For all the cynics out there, I have now written most of my book which has to be handed in by the beginning of September, so time is of the essence!  If you are keen, send recipes to loswahacos@wahaca.co.uk before 4th September.

I am waiting with baited breath to see recipes!  Let’s start the British Chilli Revolution here!

Happy cooking….

Tommi xxx

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