Vogue June 2019

129

Already a star for her

modern Mexican

cooking, chef Gabriela

Cámara talks to Rob

Haskell about a new Los

Angeles outpost—and her

unexpected foray into

politics. Photographed by

Tierney Gearon.

IN APRIL, A FEW DAYS after Donald

Trump tweeted out a threat to close

the U.S. border with Mexico, Jessica

Koslow and Gabriela Cámara cooked

dinner together for the first time.

Koslow, mastermind of an all-

day-breakfast revolution at Sqirl, her

café on Los Angeles’s East Side, and

Cámara, the chef-owner of Mexico

City’s most beloved restaurant, Contra-

mar, where languorous weekend lunch-

es are a social institution, were making

the opening statements in what they

called “a conversation between two

sister cities.” To the assembled diners,

here were tantalizing glimpses of Onda,

their joint restaurant, which opens in

Santa Monica this summer: heirloom

corn nuts and lacto-fermented jala-

peño; a ceviche of striped bass cured in

pickled carrot juice; a crispy rice salad

with curls of tofu skin en adobo.

“The language is still a bit blurry,”

Cámara says the next morning. May-

be the ceviche’s marinade was too

bright; maybe the jackfruit mole was

too weird, spilling out of a blue corn

sope like a sort of vegan Sloppy Joe.

“Cooking is trial and error; if it doesn’t

work here, put it there. It’s funny to

think of that dinner as a kind of pro-

test against closing the border, since

here we are in Los Angeles, the city

Crossing

Borders