Margaritas are served
Make mine extra spicy please!

Beloved Miramar institution is turning three, and to celebrate, they’re publishing a cookbook! You get to vote on which recipes you think should be included, and go into the draw to win a copy of the book, an invite to the launch, and a voucher to spend at the restaurant. The person/s who nominated the most popular recipe also gets a prize  (so the Wellingtonista obviously thinks you should vote for the Margarita Picante, not just so I’ll win but also because it is DELICIOUS).

They rolled out these very impressive stats this week:

Over the past three years we’ve:

  • hand-pressed 183,750 organic corn tortillas;

  • served 44,100 margaritas (we stopped counting how many limes we had squeezed a long time ago);

  • rolled 51,600 burritos; and

  • cooked 33,000 litres of our salsa

We’ve been going to La Boca Loca since it first opened, and love what they do. To find out more about the cookbook, we asked the lovely Marianne some questions.

Why did you guys decide to do a cookbook? 

Mexican food is delicious, healthy and relatively easy to cook and we’d love to see more New Zealanders incorporating it into their weekly menu at home. We also know it can be hard to follow recipes in Mexican cookbooks from Mexico or the US because different ingredients are used, or used under different names. So we wanted to create a Mexican cookbook for New Zealand.

Were you surprised by any of the top nominations? Or did you expect something to be nominated that wasn’t?

One of our most popular dishes is the Beef Burrito and no-one nominated that. But maybe that’s because they reckon they can figure it out without a recipe? Unsurprisingly, the margaritas were popular choices!

Are there any recipes you won’t give away because they are so special and precious? 

Nope, most of the recipes at La Boca Loca came to us through the generosity of people like Chris Martinez (our first Head Chef), his mother and the many people who have taught Lucas their recipes over the years. So they come from a culture of sharing, and we believe in sharing them too.

When are you going to open a branch in the city already jeeeeeez

Seriously, it’s a matter of finding just the right spot, at the right moment, i.e. when we have someone on our team who is ready to make the leap of stepping up to take the lead on a project like that. Maybe that will happen in the city, maybe it will happen somewhere else. We’ve been accidental entrepreneurs from the beginning so we’ll just keep following our noses, I guess.
You’ve got until May 16 to vote, AND you can vote once a day. So hop to it.