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where people see something familiar in
the broad, polished planes of her face.
At the end of every family visit to Italy,
her mother would weep. “This wasn’t
because she was unhappy,” Cámara
explains. “It was a kind of an emo-
tional transition. We still make fun
of her: Every time she hears the bells
of the church in Florence, her chin
starts to quiver. But because of her,
I’ve always had a consciousness about
what non-Mexicans will easily take
from Mexican food.”
That Contramar’s most iconic and
imitated dish is its tuna tostada con-
tinues to amuse her; after all, it is itself
merely a riff on the tuna tartare on a
crispy wonton skin that was a hall-
mark of nineties fusion in the heyday
of Nobu Matsuhisa. That tostada
will surely appear in some form on
the menu of Onda, as it did in April,
when Koslow gave it a respectful Sqirl-
ization, steeping the fish in Cara Cara
orange juice and liquid amino acids.
But if there is a dish that is synony-
mous with Cámara, it is her pescado
a la talla, the spice-rubbed and grilled
snapper that can be found up and
down the coastline of Guerrero, usu-
ally served with a dish of black beans
and a stack of tortillas and eaten as a
taco. At Contramar, one side of thebutterflied fish is coated in the tradi-
tional dried chile paste, while the other
is painted in a garlic-parsley dressing
that is purely Italian—Cámara’s twin
heritage on a plate.
“This is sort of a secret,” says her
friend the chef Ignacio Mattos, of New
York’s Estela. “You can put out a plate
of food and be good at it, but creating
an environment where you allow peo-
ple to forget everything—that is hard.
You enter Contramar and you don’t
want to leave. You just feel that you’re
in the right place at the right time
with the right people.” Mattos was in
Mexico City on the day of the Mexi-
can election last July; he and Cámara
had planned to take their kids to Isla
Holbox for a few days after she voted,
but when the results came in, Cámara
told him she had to stay. “I said, ‘You
have to do it.’ We need people like Gabi
involved in the political process. She
has a way with people that is unique.
Especially in this period of turmoil
and uncertainty, she is a natural am-
bassador, a person who is able to talk
to anyone at any level.”
In California, Cámara has become
known for her practice of hiring pre-
viously incarcerated people to staff
Cala. She has partnered with govern-
ment programs that support prisonersFRUITS OF LABOR
Cámara’s new cookbook
My Mexico City Kitchen
emphasizes traditional
ingredients. Pictured:
passion fruit, avocado,
cherimoya, and more.preparing to return to the community
and has become close to mayor turned
governor Gavin Newsom and his wife,
Jennifer Siebel Newsom. Though she
has lost some employees to recidivism
or addiction, ex-convicts make up
nearly half the front-of-house staff
of Cala. “There are people who have
issues with drugs and alcohol,” she
explains, “and I’ve done the Twelve
Steps with them. I’ve read the fucking
book. I will tell someone, ‘If you have
money in your hands and you can’t
go to your house without stopping
at a prostitute or at the bar, leave the
money here on the table.’ Maybe I
need a good therapist to explain to
me why I love the role of taking care
of people.” Cámara is among the San
Francisco chefs who have added an
additional service charge to restau-
rant bills to cover health insurance for
their employees. “I’ve always had the
idea,” she says, “that if you can’t pay
a decent wage to everyone who works
at your restaurant, then you shouldn’t
be feeding rich people.”
Uniting as they do issues of nutri-
tion and health, agriculture and the
environment, labor, and economic dis-
parities, restaurants are a natural incu-
bator for activism even among those
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