I want to break the caramel ceiling for women, says Mexico’s star chef

Martha Ortiz, Mexico's most famous celebrity chef, has vowed never to have children so she can focus on her career
London debut: Martha Ortiz, who runs Dulce Patria in Mexico City, will open a restaurant at the InterContinental Hotel in Park Lane
Louise Haywood-Schiefer

Mexico's most famous celebrity chef has told of her mission to break through the “caramel ceiling” women face in cooking as she prepares to open her first ever London restaurant.

Martha Ortiz runs Dulce Patria in Mexico City — regarded as among the world’s best restaurants — has published eight books and is a television star in her homeland.

She will soon open Ella Canta at the InterContinental Hotel in Park Lane.

An outspoken feminist in an industry famed for its macho celebrity chefs, she told ES magazine: “You say the glass ceiling, but it is caramel for us… And I will make all my effort to break it.

From when I was a little girl I said to myself, ‘I want a wonderful life and a wonderful life with freedom’. In a way, my restaurants are my children, but they’re more than that

“Maybe in Mexico a lot of women don’t hear me because they’re more interested in being married and having… for me, this horrible life, no? A horrible life of dependency.”

Ortiz, 47, has vowed never to have children so she can focus on her career. She added: “From when I was a little girl I said to myself, ‘I want a wonderful life and a wonderful life with freedom’. In a way, my restaurants are my children, but they’re more than that. They’re a kind of theatre, where I can write stories through flavours.

“I’m not that typical chef who goes to a market to get the fish and find inspiration. I go to the V&A and see the psychedelic colours of Pink Floyd and say, ‘I want a dish with these kind of flavours.’”

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She “adores” London having first visited with her parents aged nine, and took part in the Women’s March in the capital in January: “Hillary [Clinton] lost because women didn’t vote for her and I say, ‘What is happening with us?’” Ortiz also said she believed the UK is ahead of Mexico in terms of equality: “I haven’t lived here, but I think here you have an amazing woman — you have a queen. You have a prime minister. I don’t know if she does well or badly, but you have a prime minister.

“I think that in Mexico it’s hard; in a lot of Latin America it’s hard. But I have two little nieces and I always say, ‘Do whatever you want in life. Become a writer, a president, a senator, a designer, a photographer, an artist, a rebel — all of those things. Be whatever you want to be.’”

Read the full interview in ES magazine, out tomorrow.

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