Gabriela Chamorro Brings Dubai’s Supper Club Culture to Cairo

By the time the first spice-flecked entrees started spilling out into the fairy-lit outdoor area of Izakaya, the Japanese-Peruvian resident of Palm Hills’ dining destination Palm Central, a vivid little map of Gabriela Chamorro’s culinary worldview had already made its way onto the chatty tables.

India showed up in the puri, her crispy little calling card, while Japan slipped in through the accompanying ponzu yuzu cream, Mexico through the guacamole and the tropics through the passion fruit. Then, there was Nicaragua in the crisp corn tortilla, Japan in the ponzu tuna, Mexico in the guajillo and a little bit of Gabriela in the black garlic aioli that made up her Tuna Akami Chalupa; a fitting opening duo for a chef who had spent most of her life refusing to stay in one place.

Flying into Cairo especially for the fourth edition of Cairo Food Week, the festival turning the city into a meeting point for chefs and diners from around the world, Chamorro arrived at Izakaya with a suitcase full of stories and a menu ready to tell them. Largely raised by her grandmother, who kept Nicaragua’s aristocracy and military circles well fed while her mother was in the army, Chamorro ended up moving to Dubai with around $200 to her name and spent 13 years flying to more than 80 countries with Emirates.“Experiencing different places, trying different foods, especially in Southeast Asia, it changed me,” Chamorro shares with SceneEats. “That’s when I decided to nurture the passion that I’ve always had for cooking.” With her mind made up, she turned all those flights, foreign flavours and fond childhood memories into her supper club, Girl & the Goose, inviting complete strangers into her Dubai apartment to taste her love language. And while, much later, some of her supper club attendees would turn into lifelong friends, the beginning was anything but smooth or safe sailing. “The person that is coming to your house, you don't know if it's a psycho.”

Now, 5,000 diners and one permanent address later, she found herself cooking in Cairo. Another city that would end up sneaking its way into her recipes, showing up in her hamachi aguachile, which came with cucumber, black olive, orange zest, jalapeño sorbet, and molokhia. But for Chamorro, the connection between her own tale and Egypt was always more than just a clever menu crossover involving everyone’s favourite green soup.

She has spoken about the similarities she sees between Nicaragua and “Om El Donya,” as she herself calls it, particularly when it comes to family, hospitality and feeding people generously. There is even an Egyptian thread running through the name Girl & the Goose. The “girl” is Chamorro herself; the goose comes from the geese that once guarded her father’s coffee plantation in Nicaragua, but she has also found an ancient Egyptian connection: as the myth goes, the goose is said to have laid the cosmic egg from which creation began.

“You know when you wait for something like the rain of May? That’s what it felt like for me, getting the call about Cairo Food Week and coming to Egypt,” she tells SceneEats.

Course after course, the city’s connoisseurs and culinary-savvy social set followed Chamorro’s trail from the skies to Central America, where she has recently been moving between familiar ground and new corners, all the way to the Egyptian capital, with every stamp on her passport leaving something behind on the plate: an Australian tenderloin met Mesoamerican pinol in the Gigi Steak, while the grilled jumbo prawns arrived with sweet corn masa, beef bacon, tomato confit and ancho butter sauce.

But Chamorro wasn’t alone in her culinary journey across borders. Izakaya’s Chef Henry was charting his own route across the menu, bringing passion fruit and yellow pepper to smoked scallops, baladi lime and bitter orange to his sea bass ceviche, and a fiery mix of cashew, lemongrass, garlic and chimichurri to grilled cauliflower. His Octopus Anticucho took things a step further, with ají panca and dark miso glazing the grilled octopus, while sweet corn, carrot, black molasses and a green chilli-mint-coriander emulsion filled out the plate.

Between the two chefs, Izakaya had become its own little atlas, with Cairo sitting somewhere at the centre. “It’s about connecting cultures,” Chamorro says. “Especially one as deep and rich as the Egyptian one.”

And if the tables were getting increasingly rowdy throughout the night, that was hardly surprising. Back in Dubai, the early Girl & the Goose dinners had strangers spilling tea, playing games between courses and, later, even inviting their supper club mates to their weddings. So, as Chamorro’s Cairo Food Week debut wrapped up and table neighbours turned into next week’s golf buddies, it became hard not to wonder whether, a few months from now, we might see the Nicaraguan chef back in Cairo for one very loud and extremely food-filled Egyptian khotuba.