Wahaca

Mexican food is hot in the UK, with no little thanks to Wahaca. As the restaurant brand prepared to roll out more outlets across the country, we were asked to design a characterful, compelling, font.

Wahaca is a restaurant group selling Mexican-style street food through 25 outlets in the UK. Since 2007, branding agency Without Studio have helped Wahaca become one of London’s most successful and best-loved restaurant brands.

Ten years later, taking real Mexican food out to the rest of the UK posed several challenges. These included how to up-scale successfully; the ubiquity of the ‘streetfood’ aesthetic they’d helped create; and getting diners ready to move beyond an occasional ethnic treat. Wahaca needed to simplify.

Working alongside Without Studio, we created a new bespoke font for Wahaca. Evoking the spirit of Mexican food markets, the letterforms were inspired by vernacular signwriting: exaggerated proportions, quirky characters, angled crossbars and surprising twists.

We created two weights (Bold and Regular), which featured OpenType® width variants coded in.