What’s red and green and served all over? Pescado a la Talla and here’s how to make it.
This photogenic, red-and-green whole fish from Contramar in Mexico City has been replicated at restaurants across the country, and for good reason.
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By Priya Krishna, The New York Times
MEXICO CITY — 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, chef Gabriela Cámara.
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 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. 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 an 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, 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.
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,” 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 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 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,” Avila said.
Although she won the dish its fame, 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.” (Cámara is half Mexican and half Italian).
Cámara 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.”
Pescado a la Talla (Contramar’s Red and Green Grilled Snapper)
Recipe from Gabriela Cámara
Adapted by Priya Krishna
This photogenic, red-and-green whole fish from Contramar in Mexico City has been replicated at restaurants across the country, and for good reason. The bright, zingy parsley sauce painted on one side and the smoky, spicy chile sauce on the other make for a brilliant balance of flavors and colors. The dish is based on a traditional coastal Mexican dish, but it was the addition of the parsley sauce and the presentation — the brainchild of Gabriela Cámara, the chef of Contramar — that made this dish a worldwide sensation. It may look dramatic, but the technique is quite simple, and can easily be adapted for fillets rather than a whole fish. — Priya Krishna
Yield: 4 to 6 servings
Total time: 55 minutes
Ingredients
For the Red Sauce (About 4 1/2 cups):
- 4 cascabel chiles, stemmed and seeded (see Tip)
- 1 ancho chile, stemmed and seeded
- 1 guajillo chile, stemmed and seeded
- 1 pasilla chile, stemmed and seeded
- 2 chiles de árbol, stemmed, seeded and veins removed (depending on desired spice level)
- 4 small Roma tomatoes, the top stem-end of the core removed, then quartered
- 1/2 white onion, roughly chopped
- 5 garlic cloves
- 2 whole cloves
- 1/2 cup safflower, canola or vegetable oil
- 2 tablespoons freshly squeezed orange juice
- 1 tablespoon freshly squeezed lime juice
- 1 teaspoon ground achiote (annatto) seeds
- 1 pinch ground cumin
- 1 pinch dried oregano
- 1 1/2 tablespoons sea salt, plus more as needed
For the Green Sauce (About 1/2 cup):
- 4 garlic cloves
- 2 cups parsley leaves and tender stems (from 1 bunch parsley; 1 1/2 ounces/40 grams)
- 1/2 cup safflower, canola or vegetable oil
- 1 pinch ground cumin
- 1 teaspoon sea salt
For the Fish:
- Safflower, canola or vegetable oil
- 1 whole red snapper (at least 4 pounds; or tilapia, bass or branzino), butterflied, or 4 (8-ounce/230-gram) skin-on fillets (see Tip)
- Sea salt
- Corn tortillas, warmed, for serving
- Refried black beans, warmed, for serving
- Red or green salsa of your choosing, or both, for serving
- Lime wedges, for serving
Preparation
1. Prepare the red sauce: Place all the chiles in a small saucepan and add 1 cup water. Over low heat, bring to a simmer then remove from heat, cover and let the chiles soak and soften for 15 minutes.
2. While the chiles soak, make the green sauce: Place the garlic, parsley, oil, cumin and salt in a blender and purée until smooth, about 1 minute. (If you have a larger blender, you may choose to use a smaller food processor instead, in order to purée the mixture.) Transfer to a bowl, and rinse out the blender.
3. Finish the red sauce: To the rinsed blender, add the chiles with their soaking liquid and the tomatoes, onion, garlic, whole cloves, oil, orange juice, lime juice, achiote, cumin, oregano and sea salt and blend until smooth. Taste and add more salt if needed. (There will be more sauce than needed for the fish, about 4 1/2 cups, so store it in a sealed container in the fridge for a week or frozen up to 3 months. Use as you would any other salsa.)
4. Prepare and heat a grill over medium or heat a grill pan over medium. Brush the cooking surface with oil to prevent sticking.
5. Pat fish dry, if necessary, then score the flesh side (not the skin) of the butterflied fish in a crosshatch pattern, cutting about 1/2 inch deep, with each cut about 1 inch apart. If using fillets, score the flesh side of each too. Lightly season the scored flesh with salt. (If using a smaller fish or smaller fillets, the crosshatch pattern may be cut less deep, about 1/4 inch.)
6. If using a butterflied whole fish, spread about 1/2 cup of the red sauce on one of the scored sides, and spread the green sauce on the other scored side, covering the entire surface and working the sauces into the knife cuts. If using fillets, spread about 1/4 cup red sauce on each of the scored sides of two fillets, then spread 1/4 cup green sauce on each of the scored sides of the other two.
7. Grill the fish or fillets skin-side down until almost cooked through, 7 to 10 minutes, keeping the top of a gas grill closed between flips. Using a spatula, flip the fish, grilling until the flesh has char marks and easily releases from the grill or pan. (If the fish or fillets curl up, you may need to maneuver the snapper with tongs so that all the flesh touches the grates and gets some char; this may increase the cook time a few minutes.) The fish is done when the insides are no longer translucent and the flesh is slightly flaky.
8. Transfer fish to a platter or plates, flesh-side up. Serve with warm tortillas, a bowl of refried black beans, whatever salsa you wish and lime wedges.
Tips: Using a different mix of dried chiles is OK, just keep in mind that the flavor of the red sauce will be slightly different depending on the mix. Taste the sauce and feel free to balance with salt, citrus or some of the other ingredients as you please.
If snapper is unavailable, similar fish like tilapia, bass or branzino are suitable. However, flat fish like halibut, or flakier fish like cod are not as suited to this preparation. If you’re not accustomed to cooking whole fish, using fillets may be your best bet.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
