The Husband and I escaped to Cardiff for a night this
weekend. Too late to book ourselves into any of the great places to eat that had been
recommended to us, we decided to embrace some of the ‘chain’ restaurants
present in this fantastic city – and we weren’t disappointed.
I visited Cardiff once before, quite a long time ago. With
the Husband (although he’s been back since). In fact, we went to see the last
England v Wales international at the much loved and now obsolete Arms Park. As
I remember, Keiran Bracken’s thighs featured quite heavily (for me at least),
as did a man dressed as a leek. Actually, there were quite a lot of men dressed
as leeks, and I was quite disappointed not to see even one man-sized leek when
we returned to our adopted homeland’s capital on Saturday. What was noticeably prevalent
was the rampant goodwill amongst Welsh & Springbok supporters, a general
atmosphere of happiness and optimism. Not surprising really, because Cardiff is
a lovely city – wide streets, a mixture of old fashioned department stores and
arcades and ultra-modern architecture.
When I say we embraced chain restaurants, we did have an
initial foray into the independent food scene, visiting the New York Deli, as
recommended. Situated in one of the gorgeous little arcades, as well as enjoying the food, if you sit in the window you can also be intrigued by the barbers/tattoo parlour opposite...
Bagels, hoagies, sandwiches heavy on the salt beef and swiss, I
enjoyed a delicious Cardiff Devil’s Hoagy – cream cheese, salt beef and
gherkins, smothered in a pungent horseradish and tabasco sauce.
I’d specified
heat of 4-5 (out of a scale of 1-10) and it was just fine, and set me up
perfectly for an afternoon at the Laguna Spa that the Husband had booked me in
for (yes, while he watched the rugby, but you know what – each to his or her
own, and I was pretty happy with my part of the bargain).
Emerging into the early evening, jubilant Welsh crowds fresh
from their win over the ‘boks, we decided we were in the mood for cocktails,
and found ourselves initially in 10 Feet Tall.
Packed to the gunnels we pushed
on through, found a table and settled down to a mojito and a long island iced
tea. Very good they were too, but “…very
young and hip…” as Twitter advised me. We didn’t feel like it was overly
young & hip, but it was quite noisy, and the crowd was definitely
drunker at 6.30 than we were ever going to be getting lively, so by definition
we were probably too old to be there, and took the advice of Twitter to
hightail it over to the newly opened Wahaca, and their cocktail bar.
Now I’ve long wanted to eat at Wahaca, Thomasina Miers’
Mexican streetfood chain, and the fact that there was a cocktail bar where we
could wait for our table made it a no brainer. The more I eat Mexican food, the
more I love it: fresh flavours of lime and coriander, beans and tomatoes,
avocados, smoky spices. It’s the smoky spices that I really love – chipotle and
all that.
We were duly assigned a mobile phone-like pager and an
estimated table time of 8, and headed upstairs for a tamarind margarita. Wahaca
in Cardiff is in a big modern unit, spread over 3 floors and from the top you
can see all the way down. There’s plenty of plate glass giving views of John
Lewis opposite, and a relaxed but ‘buzzy’ vibe to the bar. It wasn’t heaving
either, so we got served pretty quickly and settled down to enjoy our cocktails
and the snacks – tortillas and delicious guacamole. I loved the tamarind
margarita – the lemony flavours combined well with the lime and the high grade
tequila they profess to use. In fact it slipped down far too easily, as did the
Husband’s Wahaca Mule, after which I had a Mojito DF and the Husband had
something with hibiscus in which was too flowery for me, but he enjoyed it…
I could have stayed there all evening, quaffing delicious
cocktails and nibbling tortilla and guacamole, but perhaps fortunately, we were
called to our table, where ‘Jack’ welcomed us. Now, Wahaca operates a little like
Wagamamma, whereby the menu is printed out on a table mat/piece of paper, and
the waiter or waitress will scribble over it as you give your order. ‘Jack’ was
clearly following his script which was a little irritating, explaining how we should order, writing his name on the menu - in case we forgot? But we managed to let that go, ordered
mainly from the street food and sides menu, and pretty quickly had some totally
delicious morsels in front of us. And another cocktail.
The first morsels were the fennel pork scratchings with more guacamole. You can take the girl out of the North of England, but you'll never rid me of my love of pork scratchings, and this were divine morsels of fennell-y saltiness. Perfect with the guacamole. Even more so than the tortillas we'd eaten earlier.
After that, it wasn't long before we were presented with: pork pibil tacos, black bean tostados, chicken taquitos and chorizo & potato quesadilla. And spicy slaw, 'greens' (lush lush lush - tenderstem brocoli drizzled with chilli garlic oil and lime - I could have eaten kilos of it), and the sauteed sprout special. It is nearly Christmas after all...
If you ask me, Mexican served this way is pretty much the
perfect food to eat when you’re happily tipsy and feeling full of goodwill:
cheerful food, bright and vibrant, and really fresh tasting. Wahaca may be a
chain, and I haven’t eaten in any of the other Wahacas, but it was lovely. I
also liked the way that they used British ingredients like Lancashire cheese
where appropriate. Wahaca has won a sustainable food award a couple of times,
and I wondered if they might be able to use Welsh cheese in the Cardiff Wahaca
– but that’s being really petty because the food was fantastic and, deprived country girl that I am, the view was pretty good too.
To be utterly honest after the lovely ‘main courses’ we
didn’t really fancy any of the puddings on offer, churros and hot chocolate and
various ice creams, so we decided to do some ‘urban foraging’ for a fix of
lemon tart. But that’s for another post…
