Day of the Dead: A guide to the best celebrations in London

A Mexican wave of drinking, dining and dancing is sweeping the capital in time for Day of the Dead.  Let Frankie McCoy be your spirit guide
Mex appeal: Estrella (Stephanie Sigman) and Bond (Daniel Craig) join the Day of the Dead procession in Spectre.
Frankie McCoy30 October 2015

Halloween, schmalloween. Lose the plastic witch fangs and get ready for tacos, tattoos and industrial quantities of tequila. This year all the cool kids are saving up their facepaint for the Day of the Dead on Sunday, the Mexican festival that’s a far more rock ’n’ roll way to embrace the macabre.

Celebrated on November 1 and 2, the festival has its origins in 2,000-year-old Aztec death rituals, although the modern Day of the Dead stems from Victorian times. Hence the Miss Havisham-esque style of the festival’s icon, La Calavera Catrina: a skeleton in Victorian dress.

Thomasina Miers, founder of Mexican street food chain Wahaca, calls it “simply an amazing cultural moment in the calendar” that’s totally opposed to Halloween, which is “ghoulish, with that scared element of death. Day of the Dead embraces the lives of people who came before you: friends, family, icons.”

Like any Mexican festival, food and drink feature heavily. Traditionally, friends and family visit the tombs of deceased loved ones and, as Miers puts it, “just have a great party!” — one fuelled by huge amounts of pork pibils, tequila and mezcal. Later there are the famous kaleidoscopic parades, with floats and costumes that Salvador Dali and Tim Burton couldn’t have dreamt up.

Burrito time: Luardos’s pink van causes lengthy queues at Kerb and Brockley Market 

But why is a Latin American celebration suddenly taking over London? For starters, 2015 is the Year of Mexico. Not a zodiac thing but a government initiative to promote UK-Mexico relations.

Far more importantly, new Bond film Spectre opens in Mexico City, where Daniel Craig is unrecognisable (save for those eyes) under a skeleton mask at the Day of the Dead parade. Because one thing is certain: you do not, repeat not, go to a Day of the Dead party unless you’re prepared to slap on thick black-and-white paint and transform yourself into a calavera (skull).

Basically, says Miers, “it’s just way cooler than Halloween”. To honour that fact she’s throwing one hell of a party at Tobacco Dock in Wapping next Saturday.

Deliberately held a week late so that it’s well clear of the gaudy scare-fest of Halloween, the Wahaca Day of the Dead festival is categorically London’s best place to celebrate death through art, music and food.

Let's get mortal: Savages will be performing

Curators from both Mexico and Britain are overseeing life and death-inspired paintings but if you like your artwork a little more intimate look out for the tattoo artists. Kids Love Ink from Deptford are up against Mexican tattooist NeoAzteca, appearing in Britain for the first time. Both have seriously long waiting lists, so maybe hold back on the mezcal if you don’t want to wake up with that skull paint a long-term feature.

Skeletons dance, right? Luckily there are bands including The Horrors, Crystal Fighters and Savages alongside Mexican superstars Zoe and Mexrissey. What, you may ask, is Mexrissey? Turns out that there’s a cult obsession with The Smiths and Morrissey in Mexico, and Mexrissey are a tribute band that set his lyrics to Mexican folk music. Laugh away — when they last visited in May, Mexrissey sold out the Barbican. Eat your heart out, Benedict Cumberbatch.

Once you’ve drunk enough mezcal to stop caring about smudging your painstakingly applied calavera make-up, there are tacos to jam in your mouth from Enrique Olvera, Mexico’s only three-Michelin-starred chef. He’s running two five-course supper clubs on the day, with food from the menu at his sought-after restaurant Pujol in Mexico City, including the infamous baby corn with chicatana ant mayonnaise. Yep, ants. No wonder tickets sold out in six hours.

But you can still get your hands on Olvera’s food without flying to Mexico: nab a copy of his new cookbook, Mexico From The Inside Out (published by Phaidon), at the festival, before heading to his taco stand, where he is making his legendary smoked mushroom tacos. They’re miniature artworks that deserve Instagramming to, well, death.

There are also steak tortas and corn esquites from DF/Mexico, and churros from Wahaca. After all, having melted chocolate smeared around your mouth can only add to your super-hot skeletal look. And if you need a touch up — or you lack the mad make-up skills required to turn yourself into a grinning skull in the first place — there’ll be face-painters on hand.

Tequila lovers: Thomasina Miers and Enrique Olvera 

For those planning to party on through morning, Miers has plans up her sleeves for a Day of the Dead hangover brunch on Sunday 8 November. Crucial after 12 hours of shooting tequila, right? Actually, no — forget your teenage fears of five for £5 shots. It turns out that tequila doesn’t give you a hangover. Olvera, who claims to “always drink Blanco Mezcal straight” also insists “I never get hangovers.” Miers, meanwhile, calls it “sunshine in a bottle” and “the most ‘up’ drink ever”.

Not convinced by the concept of no-hangover tequila? You can always celebrate Day of the Dead sedately with a nice death-themed story or two at Rich Mix tomorrow, where the Crick Crack Club presents a special storytelling evening at which performers will “dig deep into their potent repertoires to dance hand-in-hand with that dynamic trio — God, the Devil and Death”. Or perhaps an educational evening at the British Museum, host last Monday to Spectre’s DotD-themed after-party, where tonight giant paper skulls and metal skeletons will be suspended from the Great Court ceiling — making it tricky for the Mexican danse macabre acrobats who’ll be wheeling through them to the beat of Latin American electronica. Naturally all visitors to the party are highly encouraged to come clad in their best imitation of La Calavera Catrina.

But come on, it’s really all about the tequila. If you can’t wait until next Saturday to start slamming tequila at Tobacco Dock (and who could blame you?) you can prep yourself this weekend.

Latino nightclubs Barrio Angel and Barrio Soho are morphing into “spooky cemeteries” for their respective DotD parties tomorrow night, with make-up artists on hand to touch up your sweaty skull. Elsewhere in Soho tequila brand Don Julio opens pop-up speakeasy Ink & Ribbon tonight, with a one-off menu of DotD-inspired cocktails, including the dangerous sounding Don Julio Anejo Old Fashioned.

Things to do in London this weekend (Oct 30- Nov 1)

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After you’ve tried all eight for quality control, head to Knightsbridge, where the Bulgari Hotel’s Spirit Bar is dedicated to Patron tequila and mezcal all November. It’s all about the Conquistador: tequila, Patron orange liqueur, lemon, vanilla, Peychaud’s bitter and chilli vermouth. Oof.

Sympathy for devil horns — in praise of Halloween

Halloween is naff. It’s American; it’s orange; it’s for children. Trick or treating is equated with throwing your kids to creepy neighbours. It’s the one night a year when girls can dress like a total slut and no other girls can say anything about it, and is equated with strumpets preaching the gospel of slag. Offensive costumes go viral (Ebola nurse, Cecil the Lion’s tamer) and the day is equated with society’s moral decline. 

Whereas Day of the Dead is cool. It’s Mexican; its colour theme is the absence of colour; it’s for adults. You wear trompe l’oeil make-up. No one looks bad if you contour dark hollows into their face: it gives you the chic-bones you’ve never had. Instead of bobbing for apples or egging people, you go to parties. 

But I insist Halloween is better. I’m bored of trying to make life look better than it is. And that’s the point of Day of the Dead: your party’s rubbish, but you don’t care because you’re just doing this for the pictures. Halloween has always been about having a laugh. It’s the pub and Day of the Dead is a superior members’ club. Halloween is getting pissed and losing most of your costume; Day of the Dead is checking your make-up, neurotically, in the club loos every twenty minutes.

Don’t be caught dead — there’s more to life than looking cool. 

Phoebe Luckhurst @phoebeluckhurst

If Day of the Dead has given you a taste for tacos and tequila, you’re in luck: London’s riding a Mexican food wave right now, hand-in-hand with the street food movement. The Breddos boys make what are categorically London’s best tacos at Hawker House and Dinerama, while Luardos’s pink van causes mile-long queues at Kerb and Brockley Market as the desperately hungover scramble for its life-saving burritos.

For those who want to get straight to the tequila, there’s the hidden diamond of “loosely Latina” Casita in Shoreditch, where no one is allowed to leave until they’ve had a tequila con verdita: a shot of tequila followed by a green shot of pineapple, mint, coriander, and chilli. It’s practically good for you.

So slather on the paint and throw back the tequila: the best thing about Day of the Dead is that no matter what mezcal-induced mischief you get up to you’ll be totally unrecognisable under that sticky white make-up.

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