The Rising Tide of Mariscos in America

That message has been fully manifested, not just in Mexico but, in recent years, on this side of the border. The groundwork set by restaurants such as Contramar reverberates today with new openings like San Damian in Venice Beach and Maroma in Dallas. It’s evidence that Mexican seafood — mariscos — is having a fully American moment as a new generation of chefs turn to Mexico’s coastal traditions. They’re incorporating contemporary techniques with upscale hospitality, and in doing so, defining much of the current energy for modern Mexican cooking in this country. The result is a happy convergence: Increasingly curious diners, better access to high-quality seafood, and cooks eager to apply formal training to coastal traditions. Now, dishes long associated with beachside palapas and market cevicherias are being reframed as prestigious cuisine, worthy of the exactitude and prices attached to the grand tradition of haute seafood cuisine.  

As for Contramar, nearly three decades later, it has grown into a Mexico City institution, with dishes like Cámara’s half-red, half-green pescado a la talla reproduced on menus around the world, and admirers like Alice Waters calling it “the city’s dining room.” In retrospect, Cámara views her role in Mexican seafood’s moment not as something she invented so much as a craving she recognized before others took note. “We just happened to make it to the table early.” She brought that energy to the U.S. for the first time in 2015, when she opened her restaurant Cala in San Francisco, serving such dishes as a butter clam ceviche and bonito tartare. 

As if to affirm mariscos’ moment, this March, Cámara stepped onto an even ritzier stage with Cantina Contramar, a tavern-style seafood restaurant inside the Fontainebleau Las Vegas. There, her signature whole grilled red snapper — for $155 — is served in a fashionable dining room designed around an open kitchen and comal station by acclaimed Mexican architect Frida Escobedo.  

It’s no surprise that California, and especially Los Angeles, would provide critical mass for regional Mexican seafood, much as the City of Angels served as a launch pad for American sushi (see: the California roll). While most of the country’s Mexican restaurants remained centered on refried beans and chili con carne, pioneers like Coni’Seafood and chef Raul Ortega’s Mariscos Jalisco created an appreciation for the form as Angelenos embraced seafood as an essential element of Mexican cooking. Vicente “Chento” Cossio kicked off his mariscos operation from his Los Angeles-area home in 1986 after losing his job at a Manhattan Beach steakhouse. Cossio eventually moved the business to Inglewood, where Mariscos Chento — later renamed Coni’Seafood — became the staging area for L.A.’s golden age of Mexican seafood, with roughly 20 styles of camarones and buttery zarandeado-style sea bass. “My dad is now like the godfather of Mexican seafood,” says Conchita “Connie” Cossio, who was 13 years old when her father started cooking for the public in their backyard. His goal was to introduce L.A. to the botaneros of his native Nayarit, explains Connie, where “they have so much seafood they give it to you for free, as long as you buy drinks.” 

Nearly three decades after Coni’Seafood’s inception, chef Gilberto Cetina, Jr. began applying coastal Mexican techniques exclusively to the treasures swimming along the California coast, just 15 miles from his counter-service restaurant, Holbox, in the Mercado La Paloma food hall. “I knew the product was around,” Cetina remembers of the 2017 opening. “It just wasn’t being applied to mariscos — which have so much potential because of how creative you can get and the local variation there is.” 

Drawing on experience at his parents’ nearby restaurant Chichen Itza — a Yucatecan comfort food joint frequently lauded by critic Jonathan Gold — Cetina took inspiration from childhood memories of beach shacks and his favorite Baja street cart, La Guerrerense, to devise his signature taco de pulpo with calamari ink sofrito, made using a technique he learned from his dad.  

Cetina believes this current boom is just the beginning. “This is where it starts to get cool,” he says. “Chefs are specializing in regional Mexican cuisine with training, background, and techniques from other places. Now they’re focusing all that on seafood cookery. It’s super exciting.” 

It’s that precise combination of technique and responsible sourcing that defines this current mariscos moment. An added focus on creative presentation — a key element in modern Mexican American cooking — has furthered the case for more attention on seafood. One seminal point was the arrival of Cosme in New York from Enrique Olvera, the chef who’d already established an epicenter of haute Mexican cuisine with Pujol in Mexico City. Meanwhile, American chefs began not only spotlighting the regional diversity of Mexico, but also made a stand on using housemade masa across their menus. Now, it’s Mexico’s marisquería traditions that are being embraced across the country. You might witness oysters with salsa bruja mignonette in the Mojave Desert; razor clam ceviche with tangy xnipec verde in the Hudson Valley; or salmon belly crudo in strawberry-jamaica aguachile with onion ash served in Fort Worth, a place proudly known as Cowtown. 

Olvera’s hospitality group, Casamata, found its own seafood path, with the June opening of San Damián in Venice Beach. It’s the coastal counterpart to Damian, an hour away in L.A.’s Arts District, with all the marks of current fashion: Pacific Coast-sourced seafood and an in-house nixtamalization program based on heirloom corn.  

At the same time, in upstate New York, Efrén Hernández, Jr., has brought similar energy to the Hudson Valley with Pez, also opened in June. He offers zero red meat on the menu, a move made possible with the presence of more seafood distributors in the area. In 2020, when he moved upstate, there was “one guy.” Hernández now reports having eight suppliers he can call at any time.  

In the Tex-Mex stronghold of Dallas, chef Anastacia Quiñones-Pittman has long championed regional Mexican cuisine during her 14 years in the city. Now she’s expanding with Puerto Cocina, a coastal Mexican restaurant devoted to Baja, which opened in the Design District in December 2025. “Before, people were asking where I got the bathroom tile,” she says. Today, they’re diving deep on the specifics of octopus al pastor and a hiramasa tiradito with candied kumquats. 

Quiñones-Pittman attributes part of the shift to more Americans traveling to Mexico, and witnessing the fine-dining boom currently taking place in Mexico City and elsewhere. And like Hernández, with Pez in the Hudson Valley, she credits the wider availability of top-quality seafood from more distributors, some of whom are former chefs, like Jeff Harris of Ocean Beauty, who worked in New York and Dallas kitchens for 20 years. 

And while mariscos are defining much of the culinary energy across Texas, thanks to chefs such as Fermin Nuñez in Austin and Hugo Ortega in Houston, the very inland Dallas-Fort Worth has become the next front of interest, with at least four Mexican seafood destinations opened in the past year. “As Texans, we gravitate to this cuisine,” says Alex Urrunaga, president and COO at Big Dill Hospitality, which oversees Maroma. “We travel to Mexico more often than, say a Bostonian would, so we’re already predisposed to accept Mexican seafood.” 

At the same time, these chefs who readily acknowledge the current boom also incorporate some Old World inspiration, namely from French kitchens. Cosme Aguilar spent years cooking French food before opening Casa Enrique, New York’s first Michelin-starred Mexican restaurant centered around recipes he and his brother grew up with in Chiapas. Fort Worth chef Rodrigo Cárdenas learned from his father in Saltillo and later Jacques Pépin, who taught him how to debone a chicken, in New York. Classic French-focused kitchens give special deference to seafood, a fact not lost on Mexican chefs who’ve learned to cook in them. In other words, we likely can thank Le Bernardin and its ilk for helping pave the way for pleasures like the weekly changing aguachiles at Philadelphia’s Amá, which often look composed like haute-cuisine tasting baubles. Indeed, Amá’s Mexico City-born chef Frankie Ramirez spent two decades working through such kitchens, at Stephen Starr’s Morimoto and LMNO, before opening his own restaurant. 

Aguilar certainly embraced the lesson on preparation. Since 2023, he’s worked behind his intimate raw bar, Quique Crudo, in the West Village, delighting customers with dishes such as his ceviche de langosta, a whole Maine lobster in coconut-ginger marinade. He builds ceviches and aguachiles around live scallops, Maine Jonah crab, and Montauk shrimp when in season, an experience intentionally not far off from Japanese omakase — a form that Cetina even more explicitly invokes at Holbox.  

This dialogue with high-end, European-focused kitchens is even more pronounced among younger chefs, like the 28-year-old Cárdenas, whose career hinged on combining French tradition with his father’s deeply rooted know-how. Together, they brought coastal Mexican cuisine to Fort Worth in November 2025 with Dos Mares, where pescado zarandeado made from red snapper loin sells for $88 and grilled lobster tikin xic, marinated in achiote adobo, salutes the Yucatán peninsula for $69. 

And there might be no more passionate defender than El Paso-born chef Fidel Caballero, whose northern Mexican-inspired Corima, in New York’s Chinatown, prompted a dialogue about how Mexican cooking and fine dining should intersect. Caballero recently began offering an off-menu pescetarian option to his tasting menu, already comprised of around 90 percent seafood. And for him, this focus is just part of Americans’ embrace of regionality and specificity in Mexican cuisine. “Mexican cuisine deserves a seat at the table of fine dining,” Caballero says, “as well as at the table of affordable eats.” 

If this mariscos mania faces any challenge, it’s the price tag — a long-familiar tension when it comes to Mexican food in America. Beyond where to lease space for the next marisquería, its pricing can be a splurge, even in a casual dining room. At Holbox, Cetina’s prep work often includes days of dry-aging whole fish, breaking them down, and nixtamalizing Mexican corn for tortillas. Few would question the pass-through cost for a sushi master doing the same dry-aging, or obsessing over rice. But Cetina’s $4 Baja fish taco (now $7) with line-caught vermilion rockfish from the Channel Islands initially drew questions regarding how many tacos were included in the price, back when Holbox opened in 2017. Some of that resistance, he says, comes from within his own community. 

“Ethnic cuisines get pushback — often from within the same ethnic community — when you try to move it in a different direction,” Cetina says. “Many don’t want change, but what’s clear to me is we’re offering a great product at the lowest price we can.”  

But that’s the magic of mariscos: Seafood advances the conversation about food in a very specific and focused way. (Anyone remember the days before whole branzino was a familiar splurge?) By placing Mexican seafood traditions firmly within a fine-dining context, chefs are equalizing a cuisine Americans evidently love and extending a generational bridge at the same time. After all, Rodrigo Cárdenas was 10 when he first tasted Cámara’s tacos de esmedregal al pastor at Contramar, with adobo-seasoned fish replacing the customary trompo-roasted pork. He remembers how the entire experience, with its splendid hospitality, could engender lengthy sobremesas adding up to six-hour lunches. It provided his first taste of the possibilities of mariscos as a force for transformation.

Today, at Dos Mares, his coastal Mexican restaurant in Fort Worth, nearly three decades after Contramar opened, one of the children formerly at its tables is filling tables of his own, while adding his own contemporary step. 

Amanda Albee is a Dallas-based food and drinks writer whose work has appeared in Texas Monthly, The Dallas Morning News, D Magazine, Chron, Thrillist, and more. Follow her on X and Instagram. Follow Resy, too.