Inside One of the World's Best Kitchens ft. Girl & The Goose

Chef Gabriela Chamorro knows how to travel light. Before founding Girl & The Goose Restaurante Centroamericano in Dubai, the Nicaraguan spent 13 years flying around the world with Emirates Airlines. Knowing what you need to bring with you as you spend half your week thousands of meters above ground is certainly one skill that comes with the trade, but there’s a few things now that Chamorro absolutely can’t travel without when she cooks.

For Cairo Food Week 2026, SceneEats sat with Chamorro before her takeover of Izakaya’s kitchen at Palm Central, to get a preview inside one of the world’s best kitchens. Much to our pleasure, we learned that Chamorro had brought a piece (or several) of her kitchen with her.

What are these absolute essentials? To start, cacao leaves—an integral part of Mesoamerican culture and cuisine, and which Chamorro tells us were once used by indigenous people as a currency. Then came the corn tortillas. “Essential to everything we do is corn,” says Chamorro, who planned to turn these tortillas into tostadas for the dinner, to be served with tuna.

Chamorro also brought what she calls ‘one of the mother sauces’: pinole, made from corn, cacao, and cinnamon, and used that night to season the tenderloin steak with a dash of coconut cream. Finally, there was the caramelized onion—caramelized with non-refined sugar, she points out—which Chamorro explains to us are ‘super, super special’.