Gabriela Cámara

Gabriela Cámara is a Mexican chef and restaurateur, born in Mexico City in 1975 and raised between Mexico City and the Italian countryside (her mother is Italian). She studied art history at the Università degli Studi di Siena and the Universidad Iberoamericana, and worked in galleries and in publishing before opening her first restaurant.

In 1998, at age twenty-three, she opened Contramar on Calle Durango in Mexico City's Roma Norte neighborhood — a casual lunch-only seafood restaurant inspired by her childhood holidays on the Pacific coast at Zihuatanejo and by the simple seafood cookery of the Italian coast. Contramar was an immediate cultural landmark: the long pink dining room, the tuna tostadas, the pescado a la talla (a whole snapper split open and grilled with red and green chile pastes on each half), and the absence of the formal-Spanish-colonial template that had dominated upmarket Mexican dining. Twenty-five years later it is still considered one of the defining restaurants of Mexico City and a touchstone for an entire generation of younger Mexican chefs.

In 2015 she opened Cala in San Francisco's Civic Center neighborhood, an ambitious Mexican-seafood restaurant whose hiring policy explicitly favoured people with prior criminal records. Cala became a celebrated example of progressive labour practice in American fine dining; it closed during the COVID-19 pandemic.

She served as a member of the Mexican government's Council for Foreign Relations and as a cultural advisor to the López Obrador administration, and was the subject of an episode of Netflix's Chef's Table (2019, Season 6). Her cooking is built on Mexican coastal ingredients — tuna, snapper, octopus, beans, fresh tortillas made in-house — interpreted with the casual confidence of an Italian trattoria.