Restaurants

New way, Jose: real Mexican food comes to London

Even though it was dark as we landed, the city still erupted with colour. As far as the eye could see, street lamps and other gold, red and green lights coated the murky, undulating landscape with such profusion that it seemed a vast jewel-encrusted quilt had been draped across the city while it slept.

That was nothing. The next morning, as the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl cranked the temperature up to 30ËšC, I awoke amid a brilliant, throbbing riot of people, traffic, wildlife and architecture. Londoners think they live in a diverse and racy metropolis, but it can’t compare to this. Iridescent, cacophonous, unruly, Mexico inhabits the five senses, builds a hotel on them, then blows it up.

With the London opening of new Mexican restaurant Wahaca imminent, I had come to sample some of the authentic regional cooking of this vast country. With more than 100 million inhabitants, it stretches through 18 degrees of latitude down into the heart of the tropics, is lapped by two great oceans and nurtures a cultural and culinary diversity rarely guessed at by most fajita-scoffing gringos.
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But Mexico City wasn’t the place for that. Two days later I was in Oaxaca (the authentic spelling of Wahaca), a less frantic but no less arresting colonial town in the country’s southern valleys. The first thing that strikes you about Oaxaca is that it’s comfortingly low-rise: this is a seismic area, and scarcely a building ascends above two storeys. The second thing you notice is the colour. Practically every façade is painted in two or more bright, contrasting hues. When the sun shines, the kaleidoscope of any given street is simply stunning.

Mexican mangos at the market, with chilli-covered samples ready to eat

I could have headed instead for Veracruz, the busy port on the Gulf coast which shares a love of seafood with its Caribbean neighbours. Or to Jalisco in the west – Tequila country – to try pre-Columbian recipes such as the thick soup pozole. But Oaxaca is where the richest seam of traditional Mexican cooking can be mined. They call it the Land of the Seven Moles. Mo-le, not a blind mammal, but a two-syllable sauce made from dozens of different ingredients pounded together into a thick paste, just like they do in Thailand. You’ve seen the word before in guacamole, but the Oaxacan moles are more laborious to prepare and more complex in taste – and unlike the much loved avocado dip, they’re served hot.

The king of the moles is mole negro (black mole). Old grandmas argue over the proper recipe, but a mixture usually incorporates almonds, peanuts, garlic, tomatoes, raisins, sesame seeds, coriander seeds, anise, cloves, cinnamon, peppercorns and – most importantly – chocolate and chilli. The world’s two favourite flavours – and even better together. And, lest you forget it, they’re both native to Mexico.

Edible nopal cactus leaves

I knew I wasn’t going to experience these tastes sitting down at a table and being fawned over by obsequious waiters. I would find the real food of Oaxaca dished up unceremoniously at rickety roadside stalls, or, more authentically still, in the markets, where opportunist vendors set up daily to nourish the milling masses.

Oh, the markets of Mexico. In London, aren’t we proud of our farmers’ markets? And rightly so. But in Mexico, ‘farmers’ market’ is a tautology; the distinction is nonsensical. Here the markets remain the hub of people’s daily existence: provincial Mexico has not yet experienced the cultural hiatus of the supermarket. Here, a market is a market. Of course there are farmers.

And nowhere is there a more intoxicating, invigorating chaos of languages, hues, aromas and flavours – indeed, nowhere is more quintessentially Mexican – than these markets. Leaving aside the handicrafts, the bounty of fresh vegetables, fruit, breads, of newly caught fish and just-slaughtered meats which populate any of the markets of Oaxaca is a real spectacle. And besides all the familiar produce – chillis, tomatoes, squashes, cucumbers, fruit – I encountered a whole dictionary of ingredients that no mastery of Spanish could help decipher – huitlacoche, huauzontle, epazote…

All the fun at the market: dried mole and other spices

Sandwiched between one stall and another would be a humble bench and a table covered with a plastic tablecloth and bedecked with smouldering cooking apparatus. Behind it, a wizened señora would feverishly press hunks of corn dough into flat tortillas before frying them, then heaping them with freshly barbecued pork or chicken or (best of all) kid, and a dash of crumbled soft cheese. Expectant market traders taking a break, and itinerant buyers who had worked up a hunger, would line the bench waiting their turn. Tacos would be received, hot salsa administered, stomachs filled. And the mole negro, when I finally found it, ladelled onto layers of shredded chicken and soft corn tortilla at a nondescript stall in Oaxaca’s indoor Mercado de 20 Noviembre, was sublime.

It was over too soon. Back in London I craved the electric experience I had unplugged from. I wanted to taste these flavours again. And up to a point, I could. It’s not all woeful Tex-Mex taco joints; a tiny clutch of London restaurants (Green & Red, Mestizo and Taquería) eschew the wheatflour-heavy frontier style to offer diners genuine Mexican recipes. All three are worth seeking out.

Fresh meat on sale

But it’s just not the same. No London restaurant will ever really replicate the experience of grazing amid the throng of a Mexican market in full swing. Still, Wahaca has made the inextricability of Mexico’s markets and cuisine its first principle, its point of departure, and aims to create something as close to the experience of scoffing messy tacos in a rowdy market as you could ever expect to find above the Tropic of Cancer.

For starters, Wahaca is a low-frills canteen in the style of Wagamama or Giraffe. This may be a polished, Westernised dining concept, but it’s still truer to the cursory experience of market-stall eating than most other Mexican restaurants. And the menu, despite a couple of Tex-Mexy concessions, is wholeheartedly Mexican. Pan-Mexican, rather than strictly Oaxacan – which just about vindicates the erroneous spelling of the restaurant’s name, I suppose.

In contrast to the perennial menus of most of the other canteen chains, Wahaca’s will change seasonally (we’re praying for mole negro in the autumn; right now there are lots of summer vegetables). Local sourcing is favoured over air freight, so you’ll see ‘smoky aubergine’ on the menu in lieu of huitlacoche, and similar substitutions. A shame to miss such unique ingredients, but these policies are to be commended. And don’t despair: chillis are being bought from the South Devon Chilli Company. If you doubt such a northerly producer can deliver a tropical kick, just try a spoonful of the habanero sauce that’s on each table…

Canteen-style dining at Wahaca (© Ming Tang Evans)

The cool, colourful decor makes some calculated references to the markets of its inspiration, but remains slick, spacious and fun. The glass-fronted cold and dry stores are a nice touch, as is the open kitchen, even if it all only adds up to a weedy approximation of a real market’s visual and kinetic intensity. But beggars can’t be choosers, and the authentic food is what matters most.

We’ll be visiting anonymously and publishing a full, impartial review of the restaurant in a couple of weeks, once it’s properly up and running. But on first impressions, we’ve got high hopes.

I mean, they do chocolate and chilli ice cream. What more could you want?

Wahaca, 66 Chandos Place, WC2N 4HG (020 7240 1883/www.wahaca.co.uk) Charing Cross tube/rail. Open daily 12noon-12midnight.