¿Que Pasa?

Mondays have a habit of mucking us around recently, and today has been no exception. Apologies to those of you who have come to Poncho only to find us dead in the water – a power cut of biblical proportions has taken out most of the south side of Brushfield street and beyond, and although things are coming on intermittently, we’re going to have to wait until tomorrow until we’re back in business. See you on Tuesday.

Through our good friends at Escape the City, we recently had an interview with a German television channel who were doing a spot on start-ups in the recession.

It probably wouldn’t make great viewing except for the case that Frank has chosen to sport a lovely cream number, somewhat in contrast to the over-dubbed German which replaces his speech (we’ve no idea what German TV purports Frank to be saying, but if you do speak  ein bisschen Deutsch, the full thing can be found here about 4 and a half minutes in).

All this and some gurning too – it surely won’t be long before the beeb decide to commission something based on this to replace Seven Ages of Britain on a Sunday afternoon.

We’ve been toying with the idea of doing deliveries for a while now, but one major sticking point is that we simply can’t drop them off fast enough. We think we may now have solved this problem:

Note the matching orange stripes. Tres classy, non?

No, not carrot and coriander, but Chorizo and Lentil. That’s the latest addition to Poncho’s menu to help you through these last couple of months of cold, dreary weather. Also, on the off chance you don’t fancy wolfing down something as filling as a burrito, there’s now an option to go for something a lighter. Do let us know what you think.

The title of this post will probably have to change tomorrow, and then again the day after until it gets tedious to replace the last word with “x days ago” every morning.

But I digress – a very lovely journalist who eats at Poncho has done a feature on the story behind Spitalfields’ primary (only?) gourmet Mexican, and obviously we’d be doing ourselves down if we didn’t shout about it. Much as we love the leftist misspellings of the Grauniad, the excellent cricket coverage of the Telegraph and the downright defiance of the Independent not to fold, we recommend you grab a copy of The Times and see what all the fuss is about (we apologise in advance for the cheesy photos, they really weren’t our idea).

Here’s a quick screenshot:

It is our constant ambition here at Poncho to make sure that we don’t compromise the high quality of our food, pretty much above everything else really. Mexican food has such a multitude of diverse ingredients that it can be tempting to skimp on the quality of the meat in favour of other, cheaper alternatives. In our book this isn’t really on, so where others may use inferior quality cuts, we only use rump steak, breasts of chicken and loin of pork. To boot, our beef is organic, sourced from Norfolk and Suffolk, our free range chicken has a varied and fully organic diet raised on clover rich pastures (reared slowly for 14-16 weeks) and our naturally raised pork comes from happy pigs that live outside under Soil Association rules.

It’s these sorts of things that we hope will contribute to Poncho making the best burritos around, and will remain central to our ideas as long as we have a say in things.

Just because we specialise in excellent quality Mexican food, doesn’t mean we have to neglect the other geographies out there with fine culinary heritages. Which brings us to India, and a quest involving three of our girls from Poncho who will be attempting to cross the country by Rickshaw in January 2011. Anyway, they’re one short of the required 4 to particpate and are welcoming willing applicants to join them for the trip. Just stop by Poncho to convey your interest, or drop us an email at nick@ponchono8.com or frank@ponchono8.com

Loyalty. It’s a difficult thing to quantify. Especially on a piece of 280 gsm paper not much bigger than a match box. But that’s what we’ve decided to do anyway because when you guys keep hitting us up week after week, we think there should be some way of saying thanks that amounts to more than just, well, saying thanks.

So that’s why we’ve introduced a little card that entitles you to a whole, fully loaded burrito completely free. The only hitch is you have to have bought 8 burritos (or skinnies or tacos) first, but we think for some of you this won’t be a difficult feat to achieve, especially if they’re not all eaten by one person. We’ll stamp the stages for each meal until you’ve filled up the ‘burrito’ on your card:

As with all cards of this nature, they’re easy to misplace, forget about or be used as an Oyster substitute on the N159 after a few margaritas, so please be careful.

One or two of our dear customers have mentioned how some sort of refershing post-burrito confectionary (other than Snickers) would be a nice touch. So, we’ve searched long and hard for something a little different and have come up with this: Peppersmith Chewing Gum.

It’s pretty special stuff as rather than using synthetic petroleum-based additives in their gum, the people at Peppersmith use Chicle, which is sap from the rainforest growing Sapodilla trees (and has been used since antiquity for various mastication-intensive foods). In fact, they don’t use anything weird at all, no artificial flavours, colours or preservatives and no aspartame. It also has the added benefit of tasting pretty darn good, so why not try them out next time you’re down.

Occupying a new unit on Steward Street next to Spitalfield’s has thrown up a cornucopia of almost amusing to downright unbelievable delivery mix-ups. At the more risible end of the scale is Thames Water, and their army of comedy writers masquerading as bill-senders. We get quite a lot of invoices from Thames Water, not all of them necessarily warranted we think, but this latest one was pretty good:

The other address at the top of the letter at least had Steward Street as the road, but still named the elusive Mr Pongo as the desired recipient. Now, there is of course a chance that there is a Mr Pongo living on Gun Street, and that there just happens to be a cracking burrito bar just around the corner with a confusingly similar name. But this is Thames Water here, so we’re going to assume they’ve just been muppets like usual. But extremely entertaining muppets nonetheless.

Hat tip: Annette Fisher