Nicaraguan Chef Gabriela Chamorro on Supper Clubs Scares in Dubai

From corn cooked with limestone in her grandmother’s kitchen in Nicaragua to 13 years flying around the world with Emirates, Gabriela Chamorro has collected a rather unusual education in food. And somewhere between all those meals, memories and miles, she founded a supper club out of her humble Dubai apartment, forever christening it Girl & the Goose, after the aggressive geese on her father’s farm. 5,000 diners and one permanent address in the city later, the Nicaraguan chef brought her Central American kitchen to Palm Hills’ Izakaya for the fourth edition of Cairo Food Week, the fine-dining festival stirring up sumptuous bites across the city.

Serving up a menu that wandered from her hometown to Mexico, Australia and Japan, before making a very Egyptian detour, Chamorro set the tone for Cairo’s most discerning gourmands with crispy corn tortilla topped with ponzu tuna, black garlic aioli and guajillo, which was followed by her signature supper classic ceviche with leche de tigre and sweet potato; then octopus anticucho with ají panca, dark miso, sweet purée and ají verde. After that came the Australian tenderloin with Mesoamerican pinol, as well as a hamachi aguachile with cucumber, black olive, orange zest, jalapeño sorbet and molokhia, one of several little nods to the city she was cooking in.

And, as the official Cairo Food Week Media Partner, SceneEats got to sit down with Chamorro, right as the smell of freshly made corn tortillas was wafting in from Izakaya’s kitchen, to talk about the grandmother who first made cooking feel like an act of love, the strangers who became supper-club guests, and the heartbreaking moment Girl & the Goose had to leave the apartment that started it all.