A taste of Wahaca (Oaxaca) in London town

Unlike our American cousins across the pond, we Brits have not traditionally been well-versed in Mexican cuisine. Give us a good old Indian curry or a kebab any day. And up until recently, despite the vast array of international tucker on offer in London, Mexican restaurants—genuine or otherwise—have been few and far between.

The new kid on the gourmet block, Wahaca, and chef Thomasina Miers, are setting out to change all that. Wahaca -- named for the Mexican city Oaxaca but spelt phonetically to avoid linguistic confusion -- is a cantina-style Mexican restaurant specialising in “street food”, ranging from tacos and quesadillas to cochinita pibil and sopa de tortilla. It opened its doors in the heart of London just over a year ago, and since then the British public have literally been lining up around the block to sample the salsa, mole, and enchiladas.

Thomasina, or Tommi as she likes to be known, only recently considered turning her passion for food into a full-blown career. “I have always loved cooking since I was tiny and always cooked frenetically in every spare moment. But I never thought I would open a restaurant,” she tells me in a quiet moment before the lunchtime rush at Wahaca.

“I tried lots of careers and none of them really stuck… Now I’m working in the restaurant business, cooking like mad, writing about food… and really I couldn’t write a better job description for myself if I tried,” says the vivacious 32-year-old.

A “gap year” trip, between school and university, sparked a love affair with Mexico and Mexican food. “The food was just unbelievable. So I literally just ate and ate and ate everywhere we went and kept on experiencing new flavours,” she says. “And then when I returned to Britain I realised that nothing like that existed here and I think that kind of awoke a fascination for me.”

Although it was not until some years later, via cooking school in Ireland, a stint working at a bar in Mexico City, and then winning MasterChef  (a televised cooking competition in the UK), that she found herself confronted with the opportunity to open her own restaurant with business partner Mark Selby. Cookbooks, newspaper columns, and TV shows have followed, a path to celebrity-chefdom belied by her down-to-earth manner.

“We are trying to capture that excitement of fresh food, of market eating. It’s street food in any culture that is the first kind of food I look at for its influences,” she explains. “And if anything we totally underestimated how much people would lap up the new flavours. The only thing that is frustrating is the common perception that all Mexican food is really hot and of course it’s not. It’s not all about the fire!”

All ingredients are sourced locally and bought directly from the producers where possible. This often requires imagination when typical Mexican ingredients may not be readily available. Tommi sources chiles grown in Devon in the south of England, and is “talking to our butcher at the moment about developing a marinade so that we can make our own chorizo.”

Beyond local ingredients, she is also passionate about the egalitarian potential of food. “I really think the food in this country is not democratic enough, and food should be democratic as it is in Mexico. In Britain we have this bad misconception that good food is restaurant food and it’s really expensive,” she says. “It’s just not true, but basically we’ve forgotten how to cook. For me it was really important that the food could be affordable.”

Indeed the restaurant features in Time Out’s Cheap Eats guide and doesn’t take reservations, so it’s first come, first served. “I am just trying to plan my next trip to Mexico now and decide where to go to learn more because I find it so fascinating,” Tommi says. “What’s exciting in terms of the menu is that I feel we have just begun with it really, so there is still so much to put on there.” One thing that’s missing from the menu? A good mezcal. “That is definitely something we are working on!”

Tara Fitzgerald wrote for the Health section, and about the Morelia Film Festival in the September issue of Inside México.