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Loving our Lunchtime Locals this Summer

To celebrate the launch of our new Summer menu, we’re showing some extra love to our lunchtime locals with a competition that’ll be the talk of the water-cooler. If you work within lunching distance of Wahaca and want to be in with a chance to win lunch for your team of up to 8 people, enter your details below. We’ll pick one winning person from each restaurant at random on the 31st May.

Lunch at Wahaca is the perfect office escape with fresh, tasty and affordable street food dishes that are full of flavour. You can be in and out in under half an hour (but only if you want to) and with a hearty burrito from £6.85 and street food dishes from £3.60, it’s time to give that alone at your desk sandwich the boot. Our new summer menu includes light and fresh favourites such as the scallop and shrimp ceviche and the ever popular plantain taco with chipotle adobo which will power you through your afternoon admin with a grin from ear to ear.

The rules: We’ll pick one winner at random from all entries received before midnight on May 30th. Each winner will receive a free food and 2 rounds of drinks at their local Wahaca for up to 8 people. Meals will be booked with Wahaca and can be taken any time before 01.09.13 between the hours of 12pm and 4pm. Winners will be notified by email.

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Mexico take on The Balkan’s in a Battle of the Brass Bands showdown that’ll blow your socks off!

London’s Latin Music Festival, La Linea, is throwing down the musical gauntlet on April 14th with a Battle of the Brass Bands contest at The Barbican Centre set to leave audiences wowed. The musical dual will see Mexico’s super heavyweight trumpeting troop (in the form of Banda Estrellas de Sinaloa de Germán Lizárraga) take on Serbia’s Boban & Marko Markovic Orkestar, in a melodic clash of epic proportions.

We’re reliably informed that Banda Estrellas de Sinaloa already have this battle well and truly sewn up for Mexico, due in no small part to their leader Germán Lizárraga’s impressive musical career, spanning 60 years of brass blowing. But your support is always welcome, so we’re doing our bit to get your there by giving you the chance to WIN a pair of tickets and a meal for 2 at Wahaca, as well as Mexican supporters scarves for two runners up.
To be in with a chance of winning, just email ola@wahaca.co.uk with the answer to the following question.

Which of these instruments would you not traditionally find in a brass band?
A) A Trumpet
B) A Trombone
C) A Violin

The competition closes on Friday 5th April 2013, so get your answers in now and you could be joining the audience for this white-hot-brass-knuckle ride not to be missed. Winners will be selected at random and notified by email.

Any one not lucky enough to win tickets can buy their own and find out a little more about the event, through their website.

This concert is part of the La Linea, the London Latin Music festival and is produced by La Linea (lalineafestival.com) in association with the Barbican (barbican.org.uk). The winning prize includes 2 tickets to attend The Battle of the Brass Bands on Sunday April 14th at 8pm, and a meal for 2 at Wahaca to the value of £60. Entrants email addresses will be added to our marketing database and we may send you fun things to do with Wahaca. You can unsubscribe at any time.

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Grasshoppers on the menu at The Wahaca Southbank Experiment

From Monday 11th March, we’re launching a new experimental dish at our Southbank restaurant. Chapulines fundido is made with one of Mexico’s most sustainably farmed, yet unusual ingredients, grasshoppers.

We take fried chapulines and cook them with softened shallots, garlic and smoky chipotle chillies to create a delicious salsa, which is served with queso fundido, a mixture of gratinated mozzarella and cheddar cheese, perfect for scooping up with corn tortillas.

The Wahaca Southbank Experiment has always been a testing ground for new and interesting dishes for you to try before we decide whether to put them on the menu in our other restaurants, so we want to hear what you think of them. This time we’re asking you to cast your vote on twitter by using our cunningly devised hashtags, #ChapulinYES or #ChapuliNO to let us know what you think.

Chapulines are considered a much sought after delicacy in Mexico and are a real favourite of Tommi’s who always hunts them out on the menu when we’re over there. But as well as being a very tasty source of protein, from an environmental point of view, entomophagy (insect eating) is seen by many leading experts as the only logical answer to the critical pressure our growing population is putting on food supplies.

Insects are already eaten regularly by 80% of the world, but at the moment they’re seen as a novely food in the UK. Tommi gave us her take on her new dish, saying “It’s just not in our psyche at the moment, but we don’t have any issues eating shrimps or prawns so I think it’s just a question of creating a dish that will appeal over here. The chapulines fundido is a great introduction to the beautiful earthy flavour of these insects as it tastes amazing and a salsa is much more palatable for the more squeamish diners out there.”

Waiter, there's a grasshopper in my fundido!

As grasshoppers aren’t currently farmed in the UK, for our first month long trial the only practical way to put them on the menu was to buy them from an accredited cooperative of farmers in Oaxaca, but our hope is that in the future if the dish proves popular we’ll be able to work to set up a supplier closer to home, making them even more sustainable.

We hope that getting people thinking about insects in another light is a great step in the right direction of sustainable food production and hopefully one that will change our food map forever.

So get yourself down to The Wahaca Southbank Experiment this month and try them for yourself and don’t forget to tell us what you think by leaving a comment below, or get voting on twitter.

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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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Cracking Crackling

Pork scratchings with guacamole are probably the most popular snack in Mexico, especially when accompanied with an ice-cold beer and they’ve been a feature of our menu ever since we opened. Tommi’s a massive fan, as you might have noticed…

Tommi tucking into a Meixcan Scratching

In the last few months we decided our recipe was up for a refresh. We use specially selected cuts of back rind from outdoor reared British pigs which are slow cooked for four hours, then cooked twice more for that soft, but lighter crunch. Our new scratchings are finished off with a fennel seed dusting which we LOVE! It gives a subtle and earthy anise flavour. The saltiness of the pork is a wonderful foil for the creamy avocado, whilst the vibrant flavours of guacamole (fresh lime, chilli, fresh coriander) adds a delicious seasoning to the pork. All in all, it’s winning flavour combo.

Fennel dusted scratchings with guacamole

Mexican style pork scratchings are on the up these days. So good are they that Rene Redzepi of Noma fame put a rendition of the pork scratching on his world beating tasting menu after he’d done a month cooking in Mexico. He’s clearly onto something that guy.

So, next time you’re in and thinking of starting things off with your regular guac and chips, ring the changes and give our new fennel dusted pork scratchings a try. You may never look back.

If you’ve given them a try, we’d love to know what you think – you can let us know by leaving a comment below.

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Keeping it fresh. Wahaca Charlotte Street is now open

We like fresh. We always have done. So when we opened up our Charlotte Street restaurant, we wanted to keep not just the food, but the way we think about Wahaca as fresh as we could. We wanted to challenge ourselves to keep re-inventing what we offer. Don’t worry, we’ve still got the lunch and dinner time treats that you love so much, but we’re also offering a brand new breakfast, a torta and burrito takeaway, a deli for buying hard to find Mexican ingredients and the UK’s first mezcal bar.

Wahacito, our newly opened deli, will take up one of the 3 converted Georgian town houses that makes up Wahaca Charlotte Street (You’ll find it at number 23 actually). It opens its doors from 8.30am on weekdays (9am on the weekends) and it serves Mexican breakfast dishes like the amazing Huevos Rancheros – 2 fried eggs on blue corn tortillas (yes, they’re naturally blue) with a choice of salsas. Or the breakfast burrito, hangover slayer of choice for those in the know, which comes with either Brindisa’s amazing chorizo or some beautiful cured bacon, eggs, spinach, frijoles and salsa. We have a whole new selection of teas from The Rare Tea Company and a whizzed up agave and avocado smoothie. There are freshly baked breads, and devilishly good donuts which we make on site every morning. If you’ve never had a Mexican breakfast, you’re doing it wrong.

At midday, Wahacito transforms into a Deli and takeaway, serving Mexican-on-the-go for those busy days when you can’t eat in (or indeed those sunny days when you just want to sit on a rug and feel the grass between your toes). Here’s where we should introduce you once again to The Torta. If you didn’t know already, the torta is the not-so-humble Mexican sandwich that squidges roast chipotle salsa, fresh avocado, crema, lettuce, frijoles and things like chorizo, cactus or even pork pibil into a toasted artisan bap. You need this sandwich in your life. Whilst we’ll also be serving amazing burritos and tacos, we think it’s time that the torta had its day and Wahacito will be the place to get the finest torta in the land.

Head up the stairs at Wahaca Charlotte Street and you’ll find our Mezcalería cocktail bar. It’s more than a bit snazzy with a beautifully curving brass bar behind which you’ll more often than not find Jon Anders Fjeldsrud, our head of the bar. Jon has selected the mezcals for our list after scouring the hills around Oaxaca and has created some brand new mezcal cocktails especially for you. Our favourite of which is the Wahaca Mezcal Cup – A Pimms style long cocktail mixed with seasonal fruits bringing a smoky Mexican twist to this English classic. The bar will be open until 11.30pm Monday – Wednesdays and 12.30am Thursdays – Saturdays and will be available to hire for private parties and events.

So whether it’s a blue corn tortilla topped with a fried egg at 9am, a wickedly stuffed torta for lunch, or your first sip of mezcal with dinner, we hope you’ll enjoy the fresh touches at Wahaca Charlotte Street.

Here’s to trying new things.

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Wahaca – Mexican Food at Home

Over the past 5 years we’ve had countless queries and requests from people wanting to recreate our magical Mexican street food in their own kitchen. We like their style. So with these hungry people in mind, Tommi has been compiling a book of her favourite recipes since we opened up our doors on Chandos Place and it hits the shelves on 21st June.

Just like the restaurants, the book is inspired by Mexico’s markets, cantinas and a love of parties, and it’s stocked full of recipes made using ingredients easily found in Britain so you can create authentic Mexican food without having to schlep across the Atlantic.

It has everything from breakfasts bursting with energy, hearty and healthy dinners, sensational puddings and zingy cocktails. There are little plates for sharing and larger dishes that are perfect for scooping up with a warm corn tortilla and a splash of your favourite salsa. And yes, it does have the much sought after secrets of our juicy Pork Pibil.

Having given away over 4.5 million packs of chilli seeds since we opened, there’s also a page dedicated to chilli growing with photos provided by the green-fingered readers of this very blog. A special thanks to everyone who entered our competition and sent in a photo (you’re on page 223!).

The book will be for sale in all of our our restaurants as well as in any bookshop worth its salt, but if you just can’t wait, you can order your copy online now.

Wahaca, Mexican food at home is our way of encouraging you to spread the word of Mexican food far and wide. We hope you’ll join in the fun.

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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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Valentine’s Day gets a little spicy

If you’re looking for your Valentine’s Day to go out with a bang, then look no further than Wahaca, home to more aphrodisiac ingredients than Aphrodite’s larder. Just check out these (in no way spurious) claims that indigenous Mexican ingredients carry:

Avocados: Whether it’s mashed up in a guacamole or whizzed into a salsa, this silky smooth fruit of the gods is a great way to get things started. William Dampier, a nineteenth century English adventurer, said “It is reported that this fruit provokes to lust” and if that wasn’t enough, The Aztecs called it ahuacatl, meaning “testicle tree”. So, if you can get that image out of your head, woo your Valentine with some guacamole and tortilla chips.

Chillies: It’s long been known that the capsicum contained in chillies provide the right amount of heat to spice up any Valentine’s evening. But where does this rumor come from? Well, chillies contain vitamins A and C, as well as increasing the metabolism by as much as twenty five percent after the ingestion. So don’t forget to liberally pour over your chile de arbol salsa and let the heart start racing.

Chocolate: It’s no coincidence that chocolates are the most popular Valentine’s gift and the best way to a ladies heart. In fact, the tale is told that the Mexican Emperor Moctezuma drank fifty golden goblets of chocolate a day to enhance his libido and assure the continuance of his line. Probably didn’t do great things for his teeth mind you. It’s a complex food source containing theobromine, a substance related to caffeine, which gives an energy boost as well as phenylethylamine and seratonin, which are mood-lifting agents. We’d recommend trying some chicken mole tacos which have a salsa made with chilli and chocolate. Double trouble.

Vanilla: Another indigenous Mexican ingredient, which yes, is said to get things stirring in the right direction. In fact, Mexico’s Totonac people, whose region is the original home of vanilla, tell a folk tale in which Xanat, the youngest daughter of a fertility goddess, fell in love with a local youth. Since she was a goddess and he a human, they were unable to marry. Bad times. But to express her eternal love, she transformed herself into the first vanilla plant, whose aroma would always provide him with pleasure. Ahhhhhh. If that’s not enough to get you ordering our flan de la casa (with its wicked caramel sauce), then you’re a lost cause.

Passion fruit: Well the name says it all(even if it’s actually nothing to do with that kind of passion), and we think it’s best ordered in our Passion Fruit Margarita to sip throughout your meal. As you’ll probably know the tequila we use is made from 100% pure agave. And as the agave plant, is widely believed to boost the libido. That would make for 100% pure potent passion in a glass. So watch out.

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The lesser spotted jaguar spotter

This January we’re sending Matt White, of Wahaca Covent Garden infamy, off to Mexico for a 3 week excursion into the wilds of the Yucatan on a mission to help a conservation group in their quest to protect Mexico’s wild jaguars.

In the summer we offered up a Scholarship fund of £2,000 for one of our managers to travel to Mexico on a trip that would expand their understanding of the country and indulge their passion for travel (and adventure). They were all given the chance to pitch their ideas for a trip to discover something new about the country. From all of the entries we had Matt’s plan had the biggest potential to really make a difference and allow him to achieve a lifelong ambition. Harking from South Africa, he’s always been fascinated by this illusive big cat’s African cousin, the leopard, but despite numerous attempts, he has never managed to spot (haha) one. We hope this will be his chance.

He’s going to be heading to Calakmul, home to Mexico’s largest population of jaguars, but even in this area there is an average of only one jaguar per square 25km, so the chances of actually seeing one here in the dense jungle are pretty slim. Calakmul is also home to the chicaleros, which you may remember being featured in an old edition of Ola London – These are the guys who tap the rubber trees for resin which they make into biodegradable chewing gum, all by hand and Matt will meet up with them deep in the rainforest.

The culmination of his trip will be meeting conservationist Mircea Hidalgo on a ranch in Laguna de Terminos in the Yucatan Peninsula, where he’ll be spending four days working with him downloading footage and replacing battery packs in the motion sensor cameras which they use in tracking the jaguars without disturbing their everyday prowling.

If you want to find out a bit more about Mexican jaguars, check out the Northern Jaguar Project, who have helped Matt get in touch with Mircea and organise the trip.

We look forward to hearing how it all goes with Matt’s expedition into the jungle, and be keeping our fingers crossed that he manages to catch a glimpse of the “beast that kills its prey in a single bound”.

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