Wahaca

When Thomasina Miers and Mark Selby opened the first Wahaca in Covent Garden in 2007, the pitch was straightforward: Mexican street food in a format that London's casual dining scene had largely ignored. Miers, who won MasterChef before turning restaurateur, built the menu around shared plates, tacos, quesadillas, and burritos at a price point that kept the focus on the food rather than the occasion. That founding logic holds at the Chandos Place address, a short walk from the heart of Covent Garden. The menu draws from Mexican street-food tradition: tacos running through plantain and more conventional fillings, quesadillas built on black bean and cheese combinations, taquitos, burritos, and churros to close. Pricing sits in the accessible mid-range for central London, with tacos and quesadillas in the five-to-eight pound bracket, making it a practical choice for a full table order of small plates rather than a single main. Margaritas anchor the drinks list. Wahaca's credentials extend beyond the plate. The group was certified carbon neutral in 2016, reportedly the first UK restaurant group to reach that benchmark, and has collected awards across food, design, and sustainability categories. Caterer Magazine named Miers and Selby its restaurateurs of the year in the same year. Those recognitions matter less as marketing copy and more as signals that the operation has been run with some rigour across its London-wide estate, which spans Southbank, Soho, Shoreditch, Islington, and several other central locations. The Chandos Place site carries the group's characteristic register: a lively room, a shared-plate format that rewards ordering across several columns of the menu, and a pace that suits a pre-theatre crowd as readily as a longer lunch. For visitors to Covent Garden who want something other than the neighbourhood's default gastropub or tourist-facing Italian, Wahaca delivers a consistent, well-priced Mexican street-food experience backed by nearly two decades of operation in London.

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