On Monday we went along to the Sustainable Restaurant Association’s first ever awards ceremony and picked up the Sustainable Restaurant Group of the year trophy.
We are over the moon to have received this award, not only in recognition of all the hard work we put into sustainability across the board, but also when there are so many other great restaurants working hard in this area too. Have a look at the article from this Sunday’s Independent to read about the other restaurants that took home awards.
We think the SRA’s awards are going to be a great annual event for shouting about what restaurants are doing, and can achieve, with all things green and want to thank the SRA for voting for us. Ever since we opened, sustainability has been a vital part of how we run our restaurant. It’s not always easy and it’s often quite a bit more expensive, but we think it’s worthwhile and when we receive awards like this one, it shows that work has paid off.
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”.
In the past 5 years, 20,000 of our specially designed spoons have mysteriously (a-hhem) dessert-ed us and this January we’re giving all those who bring one back to us the chance to clear their conscience without fear of retribution. In fact, we’re such a forgiving bunch at Wahaca that in return for that spoon you “borrowed” we’ll also give you a free plate of tacos. No questions asked.
We’re hoping that this amnesty will be our big chance to stop our spoons ending up into the wrong hands and being used for malicious means – As makeshift percussion instruments, serving taramasalata, or heaven forbid, being bent by Uri Geller.
If you’ve been resisting the temptation to pocket one all this time, we admire your honesty and in return, we’ll let you borrow one, so long as you bring it back in January. That way you can get a piece of the action without your values being besmirched in any way. If you ask, we’ll also give you a hug.
You know who you are, if you’ve got one of our lovely spoons hiding in your cutlery draw, bring it along and grab some tacos.
Tell your friends, The Mexican Spoon Amnesty is coming and reform never tasted so good!
Rules to control the fun: One plate of tacos per table, but don’t let this stop you bringing back the 5 spoons you have, our forgiveness is unlimited. You’ve got to hand your spoon in to your waiter at the beginning of your meal to claim your tacos. We’ll take the cheapest plate of tacos off your bill and at this point, we’d like to recommend how tasty our winter vegetable tacos are. Wahaca do not encourage theft of any kind, it’s very bad for your soul. Borrowing is OK though.
Wednesday 2nd November see’s the culmination of Mexico’s Day of the Dead celebrations and we wouldn’t want to miss out on the fun, so we’re joining the party by giving away a free glass of tequila and sangrita to anyone who comes in for lunch or dinner tomorrow.
In Mexico, Day Of The Dead is a festival to celebrate the lives of friends and family who have passed away, and often sees groups of people partying on down at their family cemetery. This festival’s incredible colour and imagery is a great example of why we love Mexico quite so much. In fact, you can check out some more about it here.
Everyone who wants one gets a free tequila, the only thing we ask is that you sip it, and don’t shoot it down in one. This isn’t your average tequila – We’re giving you a measure of multi-award winning El Tesoro de Don Philipe, one of the world’s finest. To complete your full introduction to the world of top tequilas, we’ll be giving you a glass of our homemade sangrita to accompany it – Just as it’s drunk in Mexico.
We hope we’ll see you down here to join in the fun.
Just when you were starting to think that the end of the summer meant an inevitable slow and depressing decline into wintery doom, along comes Mexican Independence Day to cheer us all up. To celebrate, this Friday 16th September, we’re doing what we do best, street food for free! But hold on a split second, surely we can’t give free food to everyone. You’re right. We can’t. That would be madness. It’s only for people in the know. People like you.
This year we’re keeping it nice and simple. All you have to do is bring a picture of a Mexican flag with you to any of our restaurants on Friday 16th and we’ll give any dish from our street food menu for free. It can be a picture that you’ve found on the t’internet and printed out (here’s a couple to get you going), one that you’ve had hand-stitched for you, or one that you’ve drawn with colouring pencils. Anything that vaguely resembles a Mexican flag and you’re in. But, we’re nice people, so please don’t abuse us, it’s one street food dish per person who brings a flag with them. Sorry, you can’t bring 2 flags and get 2 free dishes. That would just be greedy. If you do fancy more than one street food dish (and to be honest, who would blame you), we’ll buy the least expensive one. It’s only fair.
So what are you waiting for, round up your friends and your flags and get yourselves down to Wahaca on Friday.
On Tuesday 13th September, we’ll be opening up Wahaca number 5 (or 5 and a half if you’re counting the taco van), and taking a taste of Mexican Market Eating to East London’s newest marketplace, Westfield Stratford City, which you’ll find right at the entrance to the Olympic park.
Right now, we’re installing all of the state of the art kitchen kit that we need to cook up our delicious Mexican market food and putting the finishing touches to our very funky looking margarita bar which will be serving cocktails, wine, beers and our award winning range of tequilas. There are also some new design elements that we’ve brought to the site so that you can eat in serious style. A table hung from the ceiling anyone?
We’re pushing ourselves even further with the sustainability of our restaurant build, monitoring our whole fit out using a BREEAM retail assessment, which means that someone is checking up on how well we do with using recycled and sustainable materials – Don’t miss the cork walls and recycled bottles that we’ve used throughout, which have earned us extra green points.
We’re especially excited to have commissioned the skills of one of East London’s most prolific street artist, Pure Evil to bring his own style and some very cool colour to the walls. We we’re looking for something raw and provocative and we thought you might like to have a sneak preview of what he got up to last night.
Looking good, we hope you’ll agree.
So if you’re in the area and need a bit of a break from the shopping, or a bite after going to the cinema, or are heading over to check out how things are going down at the Olympic site, then come and say hi. You’ll find us at number 6 Chestnut Plaza in Westfield Stratford City, open every day from midday.
For years now people have been begging us to offer more takeaway (presumably to increase the risk of spilling salsa over their keyboard), but it’s always proved tricky without disrupting the restaurants main service. Now, we’re the first people to realise that this isn’t a great answer. If the people want it, surely there’s a way to give it to them. And if you’re going to give it to them, you might as well have a laugh doing it. So the idea struck us – rather than opening up a dedicated takeaway, with traditional things like walls and a roof, wouldn’t it be nicer to be able to take the tacos to the people – We needed wheels. The taco van dream was born and the search for our truck began.
It was after a chance encounter with Simon Swift, from the totally brilliant Wondering Wine company, that we first laid eyes on what would become the newest member of the Wahaca family. Looking past the rust, gathering moss and dodgy engine, we immediately fell in love with the characterful shape of this classic Citroen HY van – Born in 1958 and later re-bodied to transform it into, amongst other things, a shop selling leather and Citroen memorabilia (not at the same time). She was perfect for our needs.
Look past the rusting exterior and there's a character you've just got to love
It turns out converting an old van into a fully working kitchen fit to serve the finest tacos and burritos in all the land isn’t that straightforward.
You start with a specialist mechanic. This one’s called Alex.
Then you breakdown on the M25, a mere 40 minutes out of the workshop – Bad times. But it was here that we learnt how useful the words “low-loader” really are.
Bad times on the side of the M25
From a side junction of the motorway, it’s into the workshop of AJC trailers, a very impressive set up, where old vans go to get their va-va-voom slapped back into them. These were the guys who fitted our Robata charcoal grill – This behemoth of the meat cooking world is like a barbeque on crack – tiny jets pump air directly into the coals to superheat them, meaning that you have much higher temperatures and a smoky flavour that is worth travelling across town for. Having done some searching around, we think we’re the only van in the country equipped with such a thing, and the flavour is phenomenal.
But this wouldn’t be a true Wahaca if it didn’t have “the looks”, so next it was off to the spay shop. Spray shops are fun. They involve putting your vehicle into a big oven (honestly) and heating it up so you get an even covering of specially developed paint. The results are a van that looks as good as new – Not a French leather salesman in sight.
Once you’ve got a van that looks this good, you have to find a good home for it. We had thousands of requests for various parking spots around the country (which we still have in mind, don’t worry), but we felt it was best to start off in a site that we know, where our nearby restaurant can be on hand to cope with any teething problems and somewhere that housed a lot of burrito-hungry souls. So we headed to Canary Wharf’s Canada Square Park. Ideal you might think, until you find out that the only way into the park is through the lobby of One Canada Square, the tallest building in the country and one which comes with a selection of health and safety paperwork almost as tall. It made for a fun Saturday morning.
After all that effort, you don’t want to open without a bang: Cue 2 days of free burritos, a mariachi band, a donkey called Larry and a queue that threated to take over the whole of Canada Square Park. Canary Wharf had never had it so good.
And now comes the reality of running a new business – One that’s a little bit different to our other restaurants, one that we want to have as much fun as possible with, and one that we want your help in shaping the future of.
We have a new menu. It’s just a starting point (albeit a very delicious one) and something that we want to work with our customers to develop as we move on. If there’s something that you’d like to see on there, please leave a comment below let us know on facebook or twitter or go along and chat to guys. We want to make the most of our new found flexibility.
At the moment it's a nice neat rectangle - Help us shape it
You can find us in Canary Wharf until the end of the summer when we are off to Gloucestershire for the van’s first festival – Harvest at Alex James’ farm. And then we’d like you to help us decide where we should move on to – The louder you shout, the harder we’ll search for a parking space that we’re allowed to use.
The Mexican Street Kitchen is something we’re so excited about. We owe so much to everyone who has contributed so much to it, none less so than Charlie Carroll – The man with the van plan. If you’re in the area, go down and pat him on the back and chat to him about burritos. He’ll tell you a thing or two about tortillas, the perfect searing temperature of steak and how difficult it is to find a mechanic in Luton who knows how to fix a 53 year old clutch.
Here are the first glimpses of how we’ll be transforming the look of our Mexican Street Kitchen, from a classic 1958 long wheel based Citroën HY van, into the newest member of the Wahaca family.
A before and after look at The Mexican Street Kitchen
Back in the day, this beast (and yes, it is a beast) has been a travelling workshop for leather salesmen in France, before being converted into a display vehicle for classic Citroen fans, so we didn’t want to lose its iconic shape or its characterful charm. It is important that we instilled some of the Wahaca colour throughout, and so we handed it over to our expert designers who have done some rather special things with it.
Taking street food back to the streets
We’ll be adding some of the imagery we’ve collected over the years from across Mexico to make sure that everyone knows where we are and where we’ve come from.
Our other van's a restaurant
Keep your eyes peeled for more details on where we’ll be opening its hatches for the first time and when we’ll be launching. We hope you like it as much as we do.
There’s huge news at Wahaca HQ and we can’t keep it from you any longer. We’ve just secured the next Wahaca opening and this time it’s on wheels. Please say hello to the (soon-to-be) Mexican Street Kitchen.
The (Pre-op) Wahaca Mexican Street Kitchen
This little beauty is a long wheel base 1958 Citroen HY Van, which we’ve procured and are currently hurtling towards converting it into a fully functioning takeaway truck. (Oh yes, and your eyes are not deceiving you, it does have a sweet pair of megaphones on the roof!)
1958 Long Wheel Base Citroen HY Van (Complete with megaphones)
The idea of the Mexican Street Kitchen is not only to serve the best Mexican street food in London, but to take it back to the streets from where we began. We’re installing a state of the art Robata charcoal grill, which will give all of our freshly grilled meat that extra tasty flavour you can only get when you cook over flames – we’re pretty sure that’s the first of its kind in a van in London.
We’re going to be using the Mexican Street Kitchen to test out new recipes that you can’t find in our restaurants, and we’d like you to be a part of it. We’ll be holding events asking you to come and help us test out new recipes, new cuts of meat, new seasonal vegetables and new ways of serving them. We want you to help us as we develop exciting new street food recipes that (if they pass the “Tommi Test”) could be added to our restaurant menu.
Keep your eyes on our blog and facebook page to find out how we get on with the transformation. But before we get onto all of this, the first question has got to be, where do you want us to park it?
It’s less than a month until we’ll be popping up at Clapham Common’s Big Feastival – A festival that’s raising money for charity, whilst you stuff your face with delicious food and dance around to a seriously sweet summer soundtrack.
We’re going to be serving up our festival sized pork and summer vegetable tacos to keep you revelling and judging by their appearance at last September’s Harvest at Jimmy’s festival, they will go down a storm.
The event is set to be a total blinder with acts such as Athlete, The Charlatans, Soul II Soul and The Cuban Brothers all playing throughout the weekend. The Wahaca Taco Stall will be amongst good company with great chefs such as Jamie Oliver, Giorgio Locatelli and Peter Gordon all whipping up their own treats. In fact it was these guys, along with our very own Tommi Miers who have been heading up the committee for this Feastival and helping to get all of the brilliant foodie partners signed up *Pats on the back for Tommi*.
And whilst you are having a good old time, you can be safe in the knowledge that the cash you’ve paid for your ticket and food is going to a good cause. The money raised will go to two very like-minded charities: The Princes Trust (a charity that we’ve worked with many times over the years) and The Jamie Oliver Foundation. They are going to be sharing the wealth, both using the money to maximum effect, meaning you can have an even bigger smile on your face, all weekend long.
If you fancy picking yourself up some tickets, then head over to the website www.bigfeastival.com where you’ll see that you can go for day tickets, or for the whole weekend, and include tokens to buy your food when you’re at the festival. Fun times.
Even more fun times – Competition time! We’ve got 1 pair of day tickets to give away! To enter, simply tell us which of the acts on the line up famously sang (and you know it’s going to be in your head for the rest of the day) “Back to life (However do you want me)” in 1989?
Just post the answer, in a random fashion, on our facebook wall and we’ll put you in the big prize draw. Feel free to include any descriptions of how hearing the song makes you feel, although this will purely be for our own enjoyment and will have little-to-no sway on the final winner. The tickets are for the day of your choice and include 5 tokens to eat at the various restaurnts on site. The competition closes on Wednesday 22nd June.
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