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with the most Mexicans after Mexico
City—more than Guadalajara, more
than Monterrey. You can’t think of
L.A. without thinking about Mexi-
cans. And Trump says we don’t need
any more.” She squints and shakes her
head. “What an interesting moment.”
For the last five years, Cámara has
been living in San Francisco with her
nine-year-old son, Lucas. (Lucas’s fa-
ther, Pablo Bueno, is one of the part-
ners in Contramar and divides his time
between San Francisco and Mexico
City.) In 2015 she opened the restaurant
Cala there, an extension of the ambi-
tions of the mother ship in Mexico City
and already an institution in its own
right. She recalls a night two years ago
when her friend Andrés Manuel López
Obrador came to Cala and told her that
if he was elected president of Mexico,
on his third try, he would need her
back home, working with him. López
Obrador won in a landslide last July,
becoming the first left-wing head of
state in modern Mexican history, and
so at the end of the summer—without
a precise job description or a contract
or a salary—Cámara will move back
into her house in Condesa, a short walk
from Contramar, and take a desk as
an adviser in the presidential palace.
To appreciate the peculiar logic of
this career transition, it is important to
understand that Cámara, 43,
is a chef constitutionally in-
capable of hunkering down
in the solemn laboratory of
her culinary imagination.
In what may be one of the
great confidence moves in
the history of restaurants,
she opened Contramar in a
sprawling Roma warehouse
at age 22, in her final year at university,
never having cooked anywhere but in
her own kitchen. The idea, hatched
over drinks in the final hours of a New
Year’s party, was simple enough: Bring
the beach food of weekend trips to
Zihuatanejo to the city. Immediately,
hungover locals who couldn’t get out
of town would come for late lunches
of tacos and micheladas, staycation
cuisine if ever there was one. With-
in months, lines had formed outside
Contramar. Within a year, the street
was choked with luxury cars.
“I thought, Oh, God, it’s become
fashionable; please don’t let it go
downhill,” recalls Cámara, whose
dark-red manicure might raise ques-
tions about how much time she spends
in the kitchen (though she points out
that her San Francisco neighbor Dan-
ny Bowien, of Mission Chinese Food,
cooks with his own pristine gels). In-
stead Contramar, 21 years later, wields
a kind of soft power: Its vast, open
dining room hosts a miscellany of art-
ists and businessmen, stylish Mexican
families and visiting pilgrims, all made
somewhat giddy by the dissonance of
fish tacos and waiters in white jackets
and black bow ties racing through
the room with giant dessert trays held
high. Contramar is raucous and gen-
teel and warm and glamorous, a pure
expression of its chef-owner.
“I have no political aspirations,”
Cámara says. “I don’t want to be the
governor of anything. But did I want
to just sit at home in Dolores Park and
run my restaurant and try to win a
James Beard prize? I’ve never cared
about that. But this is a very important
time in Mexico, and having a chance to
help more people than just the people
who work for me in my restaurants and
their families to have a better life—how
can I say no to that?”
Friends of Cámara invariably point
to her own family as the wellspring of
the breezy self-belief and magnanimity
that permeates her restaurants. Her
father, a professor of education, comes
from a large and prosperous family in
Mexico City, and her mother, an art
historian, is a Florentine who grew up
in Philadelphia. The Cámaras met at
the Catholic Center at Harvard as grad-
uate students (Gabriela’s father is a for-
mer Jesuit priest, and her mother once
had dreams of becoming a nun), and
Gabriela was born in Chihuahua City,
where her father had moved with the
Jesuits to build a school and a health
center. They were eventually joined by
her mother, who completed a doctoral
dissertation on mosaics in southern
Italy. Gabriela and her brother were
raised mainly in Tepoztlán, a town in
“I have no political aspirations. But
did I want to just sit at home and
try to win a James Beard prize? I’ve
never cared about that”
a picturesque valley south of Mexico
City that is a frequent weekend desti-
nation for families from the capital.
The Cámaras were bourgeois hip-
pies. The house in Tepoztlán had dry
toilets, solar ovens, a system to catch
the rainwater, compost. Gabriela’s
grandmother was an early subscrib-
er to the Whole Earth Catalog, the
late-sixties counterculture magazine
devoted to self-sufficiency. Though
he was an educator, Gabriela’s father
doubted the usefulness of mainstream
schooling and said yes when his daugh-
ter requested a yearlong sabbatical at
age eleven. The family spent months at
a time in the United States and Europe.
“Growing up with parents who are
very different from everybody else’s
parents everywhere you are is chal-
lenging,” she says, “but I was always
very proud of them. And wherever we
went, I always felt that we belonged.
This is all to say that I was raised in
an environment of total freedom by
two people who believed I could do
whatever I wanted.”
Gabriela’s mother, focused on her
research, had little personal inter-
est in cooking. “I remember feeling
mortified that in my house nobody
made fresh tortillas,” Gabriela recalls.
A housekeeper taught her how when
she was seven. Her parents flung their
doors open to old colleagues
from Catholic charities, and
when friends from Amnes-
ty International would pass
through with refugees from
Nicaragua or Guatemala on
their way to Canada, Gabrie-
la cooked with them. But her
mother’s mother, an excellent
home cook who during Ga-
briela’s childhood divided her time
among Cape Cod, Florence, and Te-
poztlán, was her great teacher. She had
little patience for the fumbling of chil-
dren, but Gabriela watched her careful-
ly. “You had to be good to cook with
her, so I got good.” On weekends in
Zihuatanejo, her grandfather took the
children fishing, and Gabriela learned
to shuck oysters and prepare octopus.
By the time she was a teenager, she and
her brother were throwing dinners for
big groups of friends. “It wasn’t like we
were foodies. It was simple. Chilaquiles.
Ceviches. Big lasagnas.”
Cámara has always been asked
where she was from—except in Italy,
