Wahaca Manchester Review

Wahaca was co-founded by 2005 Master Chef winner Tommi Miers and opened their first branch in the West End of London in August 2007, focusing on Mexican street food. Since then a further 20 or so restaurants have opened up across the country, with the Manchester branch opening in September 2015.

We visited Wahaca Manchester in December 2015 and had mixed feelings really.

The property is very nice and clean, but then I would expect nothing less from such a new venue. The staff were all very friendly and our waiter was very knowledgeable about the menu, explaining everything in detail, before talking our drinks order. He also informed us of the Wahaca Quick Pay app that we could download to our smartphone so we could quickly pay the bill after we had eaten. We did download it but it seemed like too much hard work configuring it and adding a payment method, so in the end we just paid with cash.

I do enjoy Mexican food, especially chilli and burritos but as there wasn’t any chilli on the menu, as a main course that is, and our waiter seemed intent on us trying the street food, that is what we did.

We ordered some fresh tomato salsa and chips and a bowl of guacamole as an appetizer and a number of small plates each from the street food menu to start the main course. The plan was to order a couple of dishes each at first and then order more dishes as and when our stomachs would require. For the first round we ordered pork pibil tacos, chilli quesadillas, chicken tinga tacos,  and plantain.

Wahaca Street Food

The pork and chicken tacos were very similar in content and they tasted remarkably similar, neither being particularly flavoursome. My girlfriend doesn’t like pork so she just had the chicken which she said had a very strange texture. She pointed this out to our waiter but he didn’t really know what to say; so she only ate one and left the other two. I tried one of them and for all intents and purposes it could have been pork as it tasted just the same as the tacos I had eaten, then again the pork tacos I had eaten could have been chicken, who knows? All I do know is that they both looked and tasted exactly the same.

The quesadillas and plantain were ok but nothing to call home about. Again just a little bland. Not every Mexican dish is spicy, I get that, but there wasn’t any spicy after taste at all with any of these dishes, not even the tomato salsa that we had with the tortilla chips, it was just like a dish of cold, chopped tomato. The closest we got to any hint of spice was the small matchbook of chilli seeds we were given with the bill, a nice touch I might add. Needless to say we were that underwhelmed we didn’t bother ordering any more dishes or even dessert so we just asked for the bill.

My girlfriend had been looking forward to visiting Wahaca from the moment she heard of its opening but we were both bitterly disappointed. Perhaps we were just unlucky in our choice of dishes, but then I would expect to enjoy at least one dish from five, sadly that wasn’t the case.

Would we return? possibly because from all I have read, I do believe Wahaca can deliver great food, it just wasn’t the case on our vist.