Cantina Contramar Opens at Fontainebleau Las Vegas

Cámara's Menu: Whole Fish, Masa, and 27 Years of Cantina Cooking

The menu at Cantina Contramar is organized around the things Cámara has been doing for nearly three decades: whole fish, tostadas, masa preparations, and the kind of Mexican cantina staples that are harder to execute well than they look. The anchor dish — the one that made Contramar Mexico City famous — is the Pescado a la Talla, a whole grilled fish split and painted with red adobo on one half and a parsley rub on the other. It‘s been on the Contramar menu since 1998 and it travels here intact.

The tostada program is also straight from the Mexico City playbook: a flight format featuring Contramar’s signature tuna tostada alongside other preparations. Anyone who has had the atún version at the original knows exactly why this is the menu anchor. The tuna is raw-ish, the tostada has to be thin and crisp enough to not collapse, and the balance of acid and fat matters. Getting that right in a new kitchen at scale is the actual test.

For the cantina classics, there‘s the Ensalada César Estilo Cantina, which Cámara positions as a homage to the original cantina-style Caesar — notable because the Caesar salad itself originated in Tijuana, so there’s real history behind the preparation rather than just a menu name. There‘s also the Chamorro, a braised pork shank, and the Camote a las Brasas, a charred sweet potato served with bone marrow salsa negra. The sweetness of the camote against the richness of the bone marrow reads well on paper, but it only works if the char is deep enough to add some bitterness. That’s a dish that lives and dies on execution.

The Wagyu Aguachile and the Caviar Sope

Cámara developed several dishes exclusively for the Fontainebleau location, and these are the ones worth watching most closely.

The Aguachile Negro de Res replaces the traditional raw seafood with Wagyu beef, dressed in salsa negra. Aguachile is normally a cold, acid-forward preparation — the beef version is a real departure from convention, and whether it works depends entirely on how they‘re handling the cut and the temperature. Cold raw Wagyu with black salsa is either a very smart idea or an expensive miss. No way to know without eating it.

The Sopes Playeros are the more grounded-sounding innovation: fried masa rounds with refried black beans and queso fresco, a combination that doesn’t require much persuasion. The Sope Elegante is the one that will generate the most attention — crème fraîche and Imperial Caviar on a sope, which is a direct play on the blini-and-caviar logic, using masa as the base instead of buckwheat. You can find similar masa-caviar pairings at high-end Mexican restaurants across the country right now; Cámara doing her version of it in Las Vegas makes sense given the room she‘s working in.

Fontainebleau has built its restaurant collection around chefs with established track records elsewhere, and Cámara fits that model. The property already houses Piero S. Selvaggio’s Valentino and Guy Savoy's French restaurant, among others. Cámara is the most recognizable name on the Fontainebleau Las Vegas dining roster to international food audiences, and probably the most coherent fit for what the property is going for on the North Strip.

Reservations, Pricing, and What to Budget

Advance reservations opened before the March debut, so the early-access crowd has already had a few months to work through the menu. If you haven‘t booked yet, walk-ins at the bar are worth trying for a shorter meal — the tostada flight and a couple of antojitos is a reasonable way to get into the kitchen’s range without committing to a full dinner.

Pricing isn‘t formally published in tiers, but context helps: Contramar in Mexico City runs around $40–60 USD per person, and Cala in San Francisco was $60–80 before it closed in 2020. A Las Vegas version of the same concept inside a luxury hotel will almost certainly land $80–120 per person before drinks, and the Sope Elegante with Imperial Caviar will push the check higher for anyone who orders it. That’s not a complaint — caviar has a price — but plan accordingly.

The room design follows Cámara‘s aesthetic at the Mexico City locations: she’s spoken publicly about her commitment to a convivial, gathering-focused environment rather than a formal one. Fontainebleau Las Vegas President Maurice Wooden noted that Cámara‘s “vision is evident in every detail, from its spirit and heritage to the design and menu,” which is the kind of executive quote that usually means the operator stayed out of the way and let the chef do her thing. Generally a good sign. Cámara herself described Las Vegas as a natural home for the concept, specifically because of the city’s hospitality culture — and in interviews she‘s been consistent about Contramar’s identity being rooted in Mexican generosity culture, feeding people well in a room designed for gathering. You can read more about Gabriela Cámara's culinary philosophy in Bon Appétit‘s profile on her approach to ingredient-forward Mexican cooking.

The Pescado a la Talla is the dish I’d go back for repeatedly if the kitchen is executing it correctly. The Vegas caveat with any chef-driven restaurant is how well the flagship dish survives being made hundreds of times a week by a team that isn‘t the chef herself. Whole grilled fish with a two-color rub sounds simple; keeping both sides properly cooked without drying out the flesh is genuinely hard to do at volume, and that’s the detail that separates a great version of this dish from a fine one.

Cantina Contramar takes reservations through the Fontainebleau Las Vegas reservations page. Budget $80–120 per person for a full dinner before drinks.