An imposing whole fish painted with bright red and green sauces graces almost every table at Contramar, a big, airy restaurant in the chic Roma Norte neighborhood of Mexico City. When I ate there recently, a server set the platter down and then paused instinctively, waiting for me to take a picture — as all the other guests do, he said.
Butterflied, grilled and adorned with a verdant parsley sauce and a smoky red adobo, this photogenic dish, pescado a la talla Contramar, has become synonymous with Mexico City, and with its creator, the chef Gabriela Cámara.
Recipe: Pescado a la Talla (Red and Green Grilled Red Snapper)
But you don’t have to visit Contramar to eat the fish. You can enjoy versions at restaurants across the world, none of them run by Ms. Cámara and many not even Mexican — in Cincinnati, Milwaukee, Brooklyn, even Manchester, England, and Antiparos, Greece.
A take on a coastal Mexican classic, Contramar’s pescado a la talla has become one of the world’s favorite restaurant dishes, inspiring dozens of homages and even more Instagram posts. It is this moment’s miso black cod or Cronut — a dish whose distinctive technique and presentation have given it staying power well beyond the usual 15 minutes of social-media fame.
“It was one of the best things I have ever eaten,” said Nok Suntaranon, the chef of Kalaya, a Thai restaurant in Philadelphia, who visited Contramar last year and recently created a Thai-inspired version for a pop-up. “It is such a smart idea. It is a beautiful presentation, it is super-straightforward, it is simple, it is elegant.”
The dish is also instantly recognizable, and provides a template — grilled fish with red and green sauces — that can be easily adapted to different cuisines or ingredients. Ms. Suntaranon’s rendition uses mackerel, with a jalapeño-chive green sauce and a coconut-based reddish sauce from southern Thailand. Majordomo, a multicultural restaurant in Los Angeles, serves a homage with chicken instead of fish, slicked with ginger-scallion sauce on one side and a Korean-inspired chile sauce on the other.
At Birch, a Milwaukee restaurant specializing in wood-fired hearth cooking, the chef Kyle Knall’s tribute to the dish is local trout rubbed with tomato and pepper pastes. He said the widespread popularity of the Contramar fish, typically served on a big platter meant to be shared, reflects how American tastes have moved toward bright, vibrant flavors and casual, communal dining — and away from old-school French sensibilities.
“This is a dish that represents what we want to eat, and how we want to eat,” he said.
Ms. Cámara, who grew up in Morelos, Mexico, is quick to point out that she did not invent pescado a la talla. But she did popularize it with her then-unique presentation. On the Pacific Coast of Mexico, the traditional dish is made from fresh-caught fish that’s grilled and rubbed with a dried chile sauce. In 1998, when Contramar opened, this simple, catch-of-the-day style of cooking wasn’t common in Mexico City restaurants, she said, even though fishing cooperatives were selling fresh seafood locally.
She built her version around huachinango, a member of the snapper family with a delicate flavor. To elevate the presentation, she spread half of the fish with the traditional chile rub and the other with a garlic and parsley sauce, inspired by her mother’s Italian heritage and intolerance for spiciness. The colors looked pretty and felt Mexican, she said.
“In Mexico, food is very much green or red,” Ms. Cámara said. “Mole rojo or mole verde, salsa verde or salsa roja, huevos divorciados. Every respectable restaurant will have a sauce that is more reddish and a sauce that is more greenish.”
The dish was an instant hit. Still, she was surprised when, about a decade ago, she began to spot her fish on menus in the United States, then elsewhere. Chefs would present her with her own dish.
“That is when Mexican food really started becoming a thing,” she said. “And then in the pandemic, it was just exponential.” From 2019 to 2023, the annual number of visitors to Mexico by air, land or sea rose to 35.8 million from 32.8 million, according to data from Mexico’s National Institute of Statistics and Geography.
Cristina Alonso, a food and travel writer in Mexico City, said Ms. Cámara and her fish have played a crucial role in putting both coastal Mexican food and Mexico City on the culinary map.
“Contramar was a game changer,” she said. “That is one of our defining dishes.”
In England, where Mexican menus are still dominated by burritos and sour cream, the Contramar fish has helped shift local perceptions of the cuisine, said Sam Grainger, the chef and a co-owner of Madre, a Mexican restaurant in Manchester and Liverpool that has replicated the dish.
“It is really to bring that piece of Mexican cooking over here that people haven’t seen,” he said. “It is not in a burrito, it is not that Tex-Mex vibe. It is super-fresh seafood.”
For a Mexican dish — rather than a French or Italian one — to draw such a wide following signals a cultural sea change, said Gerardo Estevez, an owner of Theodora, a seafood restaurant in Brooklyn. He serves a version with harissa and chermoula, which some guests immediately recognize as the Contramar fish, even though the menu doesn’t call it that.
Wes Avila, a chef and partner of the coastal Mexican restaurant Ka’teen in Los Angeles, put the dish on the menu without realizing that he was imitating Ms. Cámara. He has never even been to Contramar.
He found this a bit troubling. Because of social media and YouTube, people are looking to all of the same places for inspiration, he said: “Food is becoming homogenized.”
“Everybody is trying to copy everybody else, and it is harder and harder to get uniqueness,” Mr. Avila said.
Although she won the dish its fame, Ms. Cámara is torn about her impact. “I am proud, but I also kind of regret …” she said, her voice trailing off. “I think it is kind of pathetic that it takes a white girl to make something that Mexicans have been eating forever popular.” (Ms. Cámara is half Mexican and half Italian).
She hopes that people will look beyond her social-media darling of a dish to better understand Mexican foodways.
The fish may be the flavor of the moment, but “trendy things, one day, are not trendy anymore,” she said. “Mexican food is so much more than a trend.”
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