Behind This Week’s Dinner Kit, a Chef with a Vision That Spans Borders
Cala’s Gabriela Cámara on bringing the foods of her family to the Bay.
Gabriela Cámara, chef and owner of San Francisco’s modern Mexican eatery Cala and collaborator on this week’s Dinner Kit, is a culinary powerhouse with an insatiable drive. Speaking to her on the phone fresh off a plane from New York and mid-prep for that evening’s service, she came and went in a whirlwind — before she was talking to her team about how they could provide aid for those affected by the wildfires up north, and after, jumped into menu writing for one of the most well-respected restaurants in San Francisco.
19 years ago, a 22-year-old Cámara was itching to bring fresh seafood and bold, authentic flavors from Mexico’s coast to a landlocked Mexico City — an urban center that lacked much culinary innovation at the time. Out of this itch came her first restaurant, Contramar. What had started as a casual pop-up project with Cámara and her four friends at the helm rapidly scaled to embody a new Mexican cuisine with roots in sustainability and the freshest ingredients. The missing pieces here? No formal training, no experience running a restaurant. Just a passion for food. When I asked her how she managed to build a restaurant and brand that spans beyond Mexico’s border with little knowledge of actually how to do it, she simply chalked it up to naïveté: “When you’re 22, you don’t really know how much work is too much work. I don’t even remember being exhausted.”
Cámara has an unyielding empathy for people that underlies all she does: from her Contramar conspirators, to those who work in her kitchens, to her family and friends that introduced her to the foods she serves. “My family has always made food a pleasure. Food, for me, has always been related to family, friends, and happy times.”
“My family has always made food a pleasure. Food, for me, has always been related to family, friends, and happy times.”
Fast forward and Cámara has taken this ethos to the Bay Area with Cala — her first stateside restaurant in the Hayes Valley neighborhood of San Francisco. The food emerging from Cala’s kitchen — a tight space lined to the ceiling with jars of dried peppers and chiles, boxes of fresh produce sprawled across the countertops — centers around simple preparations and fresh but equally bold flavors all rooted in memory — trips to the Mexican coast spent fishing with her grandfather, cooking up the catch and fresh tortillas with her grandmother to serve alongside.
“I remember going to the market with my grandmother and she would always ask for what was fresh. She loved octopus, but if the octopus wasn’t good, wasn’t fresh, she wasn’t going to buy octopus.” This simple practice of eating the freshest foods prepared in the purest ways carries the recipes in her restaurants, as well as the food she eats at home. It’s the essence of what she believes women in food have brought back to the culinary space.
Women of the likes of Alice Waters, Liz Prueitt, and, of course, Gabriela Cámara represent institutions that have come to define the food scene of the Bay Area, and the perspective that guides it: a point of view injected with passion and creativity that focuses on the sheer simplicity of fresh ingredients, and the absolute joy and camaraderie good food can bring.
“If you’re a woman you can think about things in different ways. You don’t have to succeed the way men do.” And indeed when you have people asking you whether the restaurant you built is owned by your husband or given to you by your father; when talented, experienced wait staff don’t take you seriously and won’t work for you because you are a young woman, you’ve got to be creative as hell and “work like a donkey” to gain respect.
Regardless, Cámara does it her own way. She breaks through the noise of fussy haute cuisine to put something good, simple, and above all, authentic on your plate.
Order the Cala x Good Eggs Dinner Kit designed by Gabriela Camara, here.
