Wahaca arrives to London’s Southbank centre today

Crowds fled to the Southbank centre to celebrate Wahaca’s new opening, the experimental Mexican restaurant, built out of eight recycled shipping containers.

Thomasina Miers, founder of the Wahaca restaurants and presenter of Mexican Food made simple, has designed a new menu which boasts with mouth watering specials such as the Salmon ceviche, the slow cooked ‘carnitas’ and the traditional street tacos.

Wahaca, Southbank venue, is a temporal restaurant that will serve as a development kitchen where the food specials will change monthly and the most popular ones will become part of the regular menus. There is also a Tequila bar upstairs with lots of exotic cocktails for the grownups.

Despite being a chain of restaurants, most of Wahaca dishes are traditional Mexican food, I enjoyed the guacamole which was fresh, zesty, and most importantly nothing like the stuff you get in the supermarkets or other ‘Mexican’ restaurants.

It was proper stuff and so were the tacos, made with corn tortillas, and well worth the 20 minute queue, I had chicken tinga (a special chilli marinade) and the cactus cheese and courgette. On the menu there is another must try, the ‘Pork pibill’ tacos, a typically Mexican marinated meat that just falls apart and fires up your tongue.

For desert I had the heavenly creamy ‘dulce de leche’ ice cream, a salted caramel and chocolate shavings pot, but I would also like to recommend the traditional Mexican churros with chocolate, they are a staple of Mexican street food and are really moreish.

The shipping containers provide a sort of industrial look to the restaurant, similar to what you will often find on a real food market in Mexico, and here somehow the colourful metal walls also make it look chic. Perhaps it is the huge glass windows which allow the dinners to enjoy the river view or it is the ethnic graffiti wall done by the two artists, Saner and Remed, who were invited by Tristan Manco to decorate the venue, or perhaps it is its reputation, but this restaurant was like a people’s magnet today and seems like it is only going to get busier.

If you are a Mexican food lover or you would like to be converted find Wahaca located on the terrace under Queen Elizabeth Hall at the Southbank centre, it will be there for the next 18 months opening from midday until 11pm.

P.S. Dear readers and followers, I am sorry that I have not posted anything else recently, I am very busy at the moment, but I just couldn’t wait to tell you about Wahaca’s opening, besides I got to meet Tommi, [as she calls herself on her blog] she was very kind and she gave me some suggestions on the menu, and she even let me take her photo. X_X