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.