Dubai Restaurant Week: How Dubai chef Gabriela Chamorro celebrates Central American heritage with Girl & the Goose

Dubai: Long before Girl & The Goose became one of Dubai’s most exciting spots for Central American cuisine, it was simply a supper club running out of an apartment in JBR.

“There was never a plan to open a restaurant,” says chef and founder Gabriela Chamorro. “I just wanted to know if I actually had talent in the kitchen… which apparently I do.”

That playful confidence runs through both Chef Gabriela’s cooking and personality. Sitting inside the warm, buzzing restaurant where Nicaragua, Honduras and the wider Central American region are celebrated through deeply personal dishes.

And the food? It comes with stories attached to every bite.

One of her favourite dishes on the menu is the Lobster Bisque with Yuca Gnocchi. It's a plate that perfectly captures the restaurant’s philosophy of elevating humble Central American ingredients.

“Yuca is one of the backbone ingredients of Central American gastronomy,” she explains. “It’s such a versatile root vegetable and pairs beautifully with the richness of lobster bisque.”

Then there’s the Honduran Chicken Quesadilla, a tribute to Honduran street food culture, except here, it gets a Dubai-meets-Central America twist with flaky paratha replacing the traditional tortilla.

“It’s comfort food,” she says simply. “Something people can connect to.”

That connection to heritage appears constantly throughout her cooking. When asked about her favourite ingredients to work with, she immediately names corn and yuca.

“Corn is everything,” she says. “When you think about our roots, culture and heritage, we come from corn. In Mayan beliefs, that’s how humanity was created.”

Some of Chef Gabriela’s earliest memories also revolve around food, specifically her grandmother’s kitchen.

“My mother was in the army, so my grandmother raised us when I was little,” she says. “She was a cook herself.”

The first dish she ever learned to make? Rice. “It sounds simple, but rice is actually very hard to perfect.”

Even today, her culinary journey continues pulling her back home. She recently spent a month travelling through Central America doing culinary research with local chefs, including time in Nicaragua where she made sweet chilli prawns inspired by local flavours.

“For me, it was about connecting what we do here in Dubai with my roots back home.”

Even the restaurant’s unusual name comes with a wildly unexpected backstory. Chef Gabriela reveals she went through several rejected ideas before landing on Girl & the Goose.

“There was Girl & the Goat, but that already existed.

The final inspiration came while visiting her father’s coffee plantation in Nicaragua, where geese were used as security guards. “They’re terrifying,” she says. “They chase you and bite you.”

That same night, she dreamt about a goose chasing her, which led her down a rabbit hole researching what geese symbolise.

“One meaning was immigration and long journeys, which connected to me moving from Nicaragua to Dubai. Another was discipline and perseverance. Then I found this ancient Egyptian symbolism where the Nile goose represented hope and the sun. I loved that.”

And like many chefs in Dubai, Gabriela credits the city’s dining scene for giving ambitious concepts room to grow. “Dubai lets chefs dream big,” she says. “It welcomes heritage and different ideas.”

That openness helped transform a living room supper club into a fully fledged restaurant with a loyal community behind it.

One of her proudest moments remains opening the restaurant doors for the first time and seeing people connect with the concept. “I started this to bring Nicaragua a little closer to Dubai,” she says. “When you miss home, you want comfort.”

Even after years in the industry, she still gets emotional watching the restaurant buzz with energy, especially after returning from her recent Central America trip and seeing her team thrive without her there. “That showed me how much they believe in this concept.”

As for Dubai’s dining scene? She sees it continuing to evolve, but with more focus on community, local products and emotional connection.

“I don’t believe in trends,” she says. “I believe in consistency and staying true to who you are.”

It’s a philosophy that seems to define both Chef Gabriela and Girl & the Goose itself, a restaurant built not around hype, but heritage, heart and the kind of food that instantly feels like home, even if you’re thousands of kilometres away from it.