Gato Dumas
Argentine chef and television presenter
Biography
Carlos Alberto Dumas, known as Gato Dumas (Buenos Aires, 1938 - Buenos Aires, 2004), was an Argentine chef and television presenter. He is remembered as one of the most popular figures in his country's cooking during the second half of the twentieth century, and his television work helped present cooking as entertainment and as a cultural subject.
After studying architecture, he moved to London in 1959 to train as a cook. There he worked with Robert Carrier, a figure linked to the renewal of British cooking, and he returned to Buenos Aires in 1963. He opened La Chimère in the Recoleta district and, over the following decade, a range of restaurants in different styles, some in Brazil, such as Clark's São Paulo. His career combined restaurants, books, press articles and programmes on several channels.
In 1998 he founded, together with two former students, the Instituto Gato Dumas, a cooking school with campuses in Argentina, Uruguay and Colombia. He died in Buenos Aires in 2004. His legacy lives on in culinary education and in the memory of his television programmes.
Key contributions
- La Chimère, the Recoleta restaurant with which he began his career as a restaurateur in Buenos Aires.
- Cooking programmes on television, which helped popularise cooking as entertainment.
- The Instituto Gato Dumas, a gastronomy school founded in 1998 with campuses in several South American countries.
- Cookbooks, including Las Recetas del Gato Dumas.
- Restaurants in Brazil, such as Clark's São Paulo and La Posada La Chimère in Búzios.