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.