Gabriela Cámara, AMLO’s Top Chef
Her profile rose this year thanks to four projects: a restaurant, a cookbook, a Netflix documentary, and her role as food policy adviser to Mexico’s president.
Chefs Gabriela Cámara, Howie Kahn, and Angela Dimayuga at the Future of Everything Festival in New York on May 21.
Photographer: Nicholas Hunt/Getty Images
No chef has done more to popularize contemporary Mexican cooking (fish tostadas!) than Cámara, and this year her celebrity brought even more attention to the cuisine and the people it supports. Her doc, A Tale of Two Kitchens, is as much about the waiters, line cooks, and busboys who make restaurants hum as it is about the food. Her first cookbook, My Mexico City Kitchen, mixes recipes with essays on subjects such as her opposition to genetically modified corn. Onda, her newest restaurant, is her first in Los Angeles and was one of the city’s most anticipated openings of 2019.
And yet it’s her political work that could have the most impact: After President Andrés Manuel López Obrador took office, he appointed Cámara to the Board for the Promotion of Tourism, which was allegedly rife with fraud. (She doesn’t have a policy background, but they were acquaintances before he took office.) She advocated to close it, freeing up about $300 million. Today she’s focused on how the food industry can help address the immigration crisis in the Americas. Edited excerpts from her conversation with Bloomberg Businessweek’s Kate Krader: