Wahaca

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

Wahaca Southbank Experiment wins FX International Design Award

Congratulations to the team at The Wahaca Southbank Experiment who have beaten off competition from around the world to pick up this year’s FX International Interior Design award for the best restaurant design in 2012. No small prize that.

The Wahaca Southbank Experiment - Best Restaurant

Huge thanks go to our architects, Softroom and designers Buro Creative, for bringing the amazing, if slightly wacky idea of building a restaurant from 8 shipping containers to life. We’ve got to admit, they do look pretty cool.

The Wahaca Southbank Experiement is a temporary restaurnat space, which will be housed on London’s Southbank until the end of 2014. We use it to experiment with new dishes. The ones our customers like best are added to the menu in our other restaurants, allowing us to have a development kitchen that everyone can be a part of.

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Wahaca presents Day of the Dead at the Old Vic Tunnels

Lots of you will know we’ve been celebrating Day of the Dead in our restaurants since we opened. We love this amazingly emotive and visual festival celebrating the lives of relatives and friends who are no longer around and thought that it was right to make the party bigger. Much, much bigger.

So we’re putting on a 4 day festival from 31st October – 3rd November. Together with our friends at The Old Vic Tunnels and with support from The Embassy of Mexico in the UK and Nomad, we’re taking over a maze of railway vaults hidden underneath Waterloo Station and creating a celebration of music, food and art.

This year’s Wilderness Festival headliners, Rodrigo y Gabriella will be kicking off their European tour with these 4 nights, blasting out some phenomenal new tracks alongside work by a host of acclaimed artists from Gabriella Iturbide, to Le Gun and Hew Locke. There’s going to be a live score composed by the Cabinet of Living Cinema to run alongside Alejandro Jodorowsky’s classic film Santa Sangre, just waiting to be discovered too.

Rodrigo y Gabriella are starting their European tour with us for Day of the Dead

There will be food on offer from a specially constructed Wahaca Street Kitchen serving up mouth-watering pork pibil and seasonal veg tacos and there will be drink courtesy of award-winning tequila Olmeca Altos, all fuelling what promises to be a series of unforgettable nights.

Exploring the tunnels further you’ll find other stages playing host to more music and performance including a set from London based bands ‘Vado in Messico’ and ‘Keston Cobblers Club’ and a show from visual artists Frida Alvinzi and Raisa Veikkola’s ‘Theatre of Dolls’, an other-worldly visual experience using 4-dimensional art pieces, puppets as storytellers and their own bodies as sculptural landscapes. You might also stumble across a new collection of Nancy Fouts’ three-dimensional works that she’s created especially for the Day of the Dead Festival that poke fun at the contemporary western concept of death. Communion DJs will be adding to the soundtrack of the night.

You can buy tickets now from oldvictunnels.com or by calling the box office on 0844 871 7628. Tickets include wahaca food from our festival’s temporary street kitchen as well as entry to the funtimes which run from 7pm – 1am each night. All profits from the event will be going to charity.

Saturday daytime entrance at £5 (2pm – 6pm) offers an opportunity to view the exciting visual artists on show and enjoy screenings of the Alejandro Jodorowsky classic film Santa Sangre with The Cabinet of Living Cinema performing a matinee live score.

We’ll look forward to seeing you down there.

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Going experimental down on The Southbank

The Wahaca Southbank Experiment is our new temporary restaurant, opening at Southbank Centre alongside Waterloo Bridge today. It’s not like a Wahaca restaurant that you may have seen before, we’ve challenged ourselves to be more innovative. It’s built from 8 recycled shipping containers and we’ve introduced a new menu with monthly changing specials, the most popular of which will take up residency in all of our restaurants. We like to think it’ll help to keep us on our toes.

Our 8 shipping containers have been modified to create an interlinked open space on 2 levels to include panoramic windows offering some pretty stunning views of the river and the passing parade of people floating by. If you’re after a cocktail, it also has a dedicated tequila bar serving award winning tequilas and single village mezcals.

We’ve enlisted the help of street art curator Tristan Manco who has invited 2 graffiti artists, Saner and Remed, to decorate the space for our opening, bringing some extra colour to the riverside.

Remed and Saner at work

Tommi has been up to her elbows in new recipes specifically for this site following our recent trip to Mexico and LA. We’re starting off with some punchy chilli tacos, salmon ceviche (a Mexico City fusion favourite) and a couple of different ways of eating beautifully slow cooked carnitas.

The Wahaca Southbank Experiment will be our new development kitchen and because the most popular dishes will be added to our regular menu, you are all our new recipe testers. Welcome to the team. We can’t wait to get the experiment started.

The Wahaca Southbank Experiment is located on the terrace under Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre, Belvedere Road, London, SE1 8XX. It will be open daily for the next 18 months from midday – 11pm (10.30pm on Sundays).

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We investigate Southbank Centre’s Festival of the World

This July we’re opening up The Wahaca Southbank Experiment. It’ll be like no Wahaca you’ve ever seen, built from 8 recycled shipping containers and serving a more experimental menu, which we’ll be testing out on you, to see which ones you like best.

As diligent new tenants we wanted to find out what we’re getting ourselves into, so here’s a bit of a low down on our new home and what they’re up to over the summer.

Southbank Centre is the UK’s largest arts centre, occupying a 21-acre site that sits in the midst of London’s most vibrant cultural quarter on the South Bank of the Thames. The site has an amazing creative and architectural history stretching back to the 1951 Festival of Britain when it was first built.

Southbank Centre is home to the Royal Festival Hall, Queen Elizabeth Hall (Which is where we’ll be setting up), the Purcell Room and the Hayward Gallery as well as The Saison Poetry Library and the Arts Council Collection. We also found a tranquil little roof top garden, just next door to our new site, manned by volunteers from The Eden Project.

As London welcomes the world this summer, Southbank Centre’s Festival of the World will include inspirational projects from the UK and around the world, which showcase the power of the arts to change the lives of individuals, communities and whole societies. The festival opens on 1 June 2012 for the Diamond Jubilee Weekend, and closes on 9 September 2012. The whole of the Southbank Centre site will be transformed with art installations including a giant ‘robot’ sculpture; a colossal baobab tree made from fabric; ‘Rainbow Park’, a multi-coloured beach; and an exhibition in the Royal Festival Hall of the thinkers, artists and communities who have inspired and contributed to the Festival.

We can’t wait to move in!

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Wahaca goes East

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.

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Gabriel Orozco at The Tate Modern

Win one of 5 pairs of tickets to Gabriel Orozco’s critically acclaimed Tate Modern exhibition.

For those of you who’ve been following our blog and diligently reading ‘Ola London, it will come as no surprise that we’re pretty keen on our art, and particularly the amazing work that is being produced by Mexican artists in recent years.

The Tate Modern is currently hosting an exhibition by one of our all-time favourite Mexican artists – Gabriel Orozco. His work is described as creative, playful and inventive, often introducing beautiful geometric symmetry into everyday objects. You can check what happened when Tommi met up with him in Wahaca and picked his brains about Mexican food, culture and generally being a world renowned artist here.

To celebrate the largest retrospective of his work being exhibited here in London, the Tate Modern have kindly donated 5 pairs of tickets for us to share with you, the lovely readers of our blog.

How to enter: We don’t just want to give these tickets to anyone though, it’s our most arty fans we’re looking for, so email us an arty photo of you in Wahaca and we’ll choose our favourite on Friday 11th March. If you want to share your artiness with the rest of the gang, then you can also post your photos up onto our facebook wall for all to admire.

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Remi/Rough gets to work in Soho

With our new restaurant on Wardour Street in Soho fast approaching completion, one of the last tasks is to get someone to splash a bit of paint on the walls. You know, make it look nice.

In fact, local residents and inquisative passers by may have noticed that there’s been quite a bit of that going on, and we’ll give you the full low down on all of the artists that worked on the interior soon. But today, it was the turn of Remi Morgan or Remi/Rough (to those in the know) and we thought he deserved special mention due to his recent involvement in the often whispered about, but until yesterday never reported, Underbelly Project.

Thanks to Vandalog for the images via flickr and creative commons.

Remi was one of 100 of the worlds top street artists that was invited to take part in a one off art project, deep under the heart of New York City in a dissused and now totally un-accessible subway station. The space was transformed into a exhibition to which only one reporter and a handful of photographers were invited, and which was only on show for one night. Pretty Cool.

When we asked him about it in a break from graffiting our bar, Remi mostly recalled the fear of being eaten by mutant sized rats, and the pitch black that perpetuated the space. With this in mind, we’ve left the lights on for him and you’ll be pleased to hear he’s doing a cracking job.

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Street Sketchbook Book launch

We were really excited to be contacted by Tristan Manco, author and general force-for-street-art-good, who let us know about the launch of his new book, Street Sketchbook – Journeys.

In the book Tristan explores the secret world of sketchbooks by tracing artists creative journeys, from the initial idea to its development. He features work by the most innovative street and graffiti artists from around the world, and unsurprisingly it contains a large proportion of work from the growing number of Mexican artists pushing the boundaries of street art, both in the UK and at home in Mexico.

To find out more and see a selection of the work from the artists featured, including Daniel Acosta, Daniel Berman and Uriel Marin, check out the exhibition running at the Pictures on Walls gallery, 46 – 48 Commercial Street, from Friday 1st October 6pm. For full details, check out their events page.

If you do go along, we’d love to hear what you think – just leave a comment below.

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Photos from an Oaxacan

Last week we were lucky enough to get a visit from Daniel Molina, who came in to sample our wares. He’s a potographer from Mexico, Oaxaca to be precise.

Keen to support those from the area that has supported us so well, we thought we’d share some of the brilliant work he’s done, with you good people.

The selection below is taken from his gallery of pictures entitled, “This is not London”. Now, not wanting to be pedantic, but I’ve had a hard look, and I’m pretty sure it is, I guess that’s just the Mexican sense of humour. Anyway, we’ll let you decide.

If you like this small foray into Daniel’s work, then be sure to check out his website for more of the same. And indeed if you know of any other up and coming Mexican photographers or artists, please let us know by commenting below. We’d love to make it a regular feature on the blog.

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