Wahaca

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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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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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New Dash of Wahaca salsas arrive on our tables

If you’ve been into Wahaca recently, you might have spotted the first of our new Dash of Wahaca salsas which have landed on the tables in the last few weeks.

Designed to be splashed on liberally

It’s been a labour of love but for the last year Tommi has been working tirelessly on the recipes with a specialist company who has created the great looking bottles for us. To give you an idea of the amount of effort that has gone into each one, just check out the list of ingredients – All of which are totally natural with no nasty preservatives anywhere in sight. In fact, if you have a look, you can see all of the little bits of chopped up herbs and spices swimming around inside the bottle.

Tommi has made 3 salsas for us to start off with. A brand new searingly hot chile de arbol sauce and new (and even tastier) versions of our yellow habanero and our smoky chipotle chile salsas that have been used on the tables in the last few years. So now there are 3 very different flavoured salsas each with a different level of spicines for you to choose from.

The brilliant news is, if you want to take some with you to give your home cooking a dash of Wahaca (see what we’ve done there?), you can buy them in our restaurants for £2.50 a bottle, just ask one of the waiters. Over the next few weeks, we’ll post a couple of recipes on the website so that you can discover some new ways of spicing things up in your own kitchen.

As always, we’d love to hear from anyone who’s tried them out already. What do you think of the new bottles? Do you have a favourite? Would they make the perfect Christmas present? (Yes they would).

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Wahaca butchery day

We’re always looking for new ways to come up with recipes and to use different cuts of meat at Wahaca, so a couple of days ago Tommi invited all of our chefs over to her house for a day of butchery and recipe development.

Our lovely butcher brought along half a pig, along with a couple of more random cuts to see what we could come up with. It was brilliant to see all of the chefs’ minds whirring at the same time and the results were as tasty as you might imagine.

Dishes included Elki’s rather scary sounding pig head tortas, drowned in chipotle salsa (‘tortas ahogadas’ to you and me) and Leo’s slightly less Mexican, but no less delicious pork and herb sausages! There was also Mexican Pozole, chicken liver tacos and beef cheeks cooked in a red mole.

Are there any Mexican inspired dishes that you would love to see us try out for the Wahaca Menu? Or indeed that you’ve tried out yourselves and would like to share with the team? Don’t be shy.

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Not just great Mexican food, sort your Christmas shopping too!

Last night saw Tommi hosting our first ‘in-house’ cooking demo in our brand spanking new Soho bar, to celebrate the launch of The Observer Food Monthly’s brand new book “Cook: A Year in the Kitchen with Britain’s Favourite Chefs”. 

We were delighted to welcome the editor, Rebecca Seal to introduce the book.  She gave an eye-opening peek behind the scenes of what it’s like to put together a cookbook with contributions from over 80 of Britain’s best loved chefs. No easy task by the sound of it!

Tommi made child’s play of our brand new demo equipment, elegantly splicing together an amazing range of salsas – Chipotles in Adobo, Roast Chipotle Salsa and Chipotle Mayonaise – Who knew Chiptole could create such amazing flavour?! They were all delicious and can be found throughout our menu if you look closely.

But we’re not just telling you this to make you jealous, you can join in the fun too. The Observer & Guardian Book Store  have very kindly offered you, the good readers of our blog, a chance to buy the book for half the normal price. All you have to do is visit their website and pop the code “Wahaca” into the field marked ‘promotional code’, then start impressing your pals with a whole range of seasonal treats throughout the year.

Whilst we’re on the subject of books, if you did fancy cooking up your own version of Tommi’s salsas, then you can learn all about them in her book, Mexican Food Made Simple, which you can find nestled nicely here. It’s really rather good.

So that’s this year’s Christmas shopping sorted then.  Inspired by the markets of Mexico you could say.

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Mexican Cooking comes to The Dock Kitchen

Stevie is an old friend who I met at Ballymaloe, rather a long time ago now. He is an amazing cook with a passion for exotic spices from around the world, beautiful ingredients and unfussy food. The result is a wonderful mix of simply presented food from around the world, never with too many ingredients competing for attention. His flair with spices produces some sensational marinades, delicious chutneys and daals and he makes a mean biryani. One day he is going to teach me how to make his chaat masala too.

He occasionally lets me come and play at the Dock with him. A coulple of weeks ago we cooked Mexican together. We sat down with three-week old Samuel, his first-born and devised a menu together which we cooked all of this week at the Dock (I only did Tuesday and Wednesday as had other menus to do at Wahaca).

It’s a delight cooking there, as like Petersham Nurseries, you can just pop out of the kitchen to the herb garden to pick whatever herb you think might make all the difference to your chillie paste, sauce or soup…

The kitchen is also completely open lined with glass, rather than the conventional walls. How Stevie moved from the River Cafe, with all that beautiful light, to the only other kitchen in London that I know of, that is also an ode to light, is beyond me, but fairly typical of his natural jamminess. On August 21st they are closing for a fortnight and building a souped up kitchen courtesy of Wolf/Sub-zero, possibly the sexiest, coolest kitchen makers in the world, and the restaurant will double the number of seats it has to 80. What excitement.

Meanwhile a brief sypnopsis of our menu. We started with some corn which we shaved off the cobb and sauteed with sweet onion, garlic, a chipotle paste I made and masses and masses of butter. The result, a sweet, smoky, fiery filling for a white corn taco. It was so popular that I think I am going to put it on the wahaca menu next summer. Yum.

Next up was courgettes, a thoroughly Mexican vegetable, sauteed with girolles and summer herbs…

And then a plate of octopus which we rolled in crumbed crisy pig skin, deep-fried and served with a fruity, fiery habanero salsa…

This recipe was thanks to a friend Roberto Solis of the restaurant Nectar in Merida. Totally yummy, thanks for the idea Roberto, I hope you are enjoying Noma this week, you lucky so-and-so.

We did a sopa de guia next, which is a broth flavoured with wild herbs and leaves, which I first had at Casa Oaxaca, cooked by the wonderful Alejandro Ruiz…

And finally a slow-cooked shoulder of saltmarsh lamb, marinaded in ancho, chile de arbol and pasilla de oaxaca chillies and slow cooked over a bed of carrots, celery and onions and served with the classic shredded cabbage, radish and coriander slaw.

The pudding, which I failed to capture (please excuse my crummy photographs) was blackcurrant, hibiscus and tequila made by the lovely Hannah (ex-Ballymaloer) and Mexican wedding cookies made by the equally lovely Lewen (also ex-Ballymaloer maybe?). I had to go back to take these picces on Thursday, when I was no longer cooking and bumped into Mary Portas, Queen of Shops, who was eating there! Quelle excitement! I love Mary’s love of independent shops, what a woman. She was looking as stylish as ever.
So all in all an idyllic week, cooking with Stevie’s amazing team (here is Stevie and Lewen).

Creating food, talking to great people and feeling that life is good.

Thanks so much for having me guys, good luck with the refurb and thanks for the cooking tips.

tommi xxx

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