Gabriela Cámara, AMLO’s Top Chef

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- 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:

What are you trying to do to help migrants?

We're seeing an increasing number of deported Mexicans who have worked with food in the U.S. and tons of migrants from Central America who are stuck in Mexico. I'm working on a way of integrating them into jobs. It's challenging to make them feel at home. Food is a great place for that. Restaurant jobs, from construction to cooking, have traditionally been a way for people to move up in society.

How can you make that happen?

I want to bring people to the countryside. Mexico is a centralized country: Migration to the capital has been huge, and deported people don't want to go back to the towns they were born in. The Ministry of Social Development is working on a program that will help people live in places where they were born. We have even changed the name to the Ministry of Wellbeing.

Meanwhile, you continue to open restaurants.

Onda has finally opened. That's a collaboration with Jessica Koslow [chef-owner of the popular L.A. breakfast-lunch spot Sqirl]. It's a combination of all the foods we love—it has Mexican-ness, but also Asian-ness, European-ness. I've added a strong corn program. We're nixtamalizing [soaking and hulling] and grinding corn for fresh tortillas. We're importing heirloom corn from Mexico, which is another way to support local industries there.

But in 2020, I'll be spending more time in Mexico City. I'm opening a new restaurant downtown. The deported community could be a crucial part of my new kitchen.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Bret Begun at bbegun@bloomberg.net, Jeremy Keehn

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