You can’t travel a city block in San Francisco without tripping over a burrito or a tasting menu — yet you can count the number of Mexican fine dining restaurants in the Bay Area on one hand.
A decade ago, Mexican fine dining was all the rage, with a bicoastal scene of restaurants in California and New York from both domestic chefs and the Mexico City icons that put the country’s haute cuisine on the global stage. Enrique Olvera, of the Michelin-starred Pujol in Mexico City and arguably Mexico’s most famous chef, went on to open restaurants in New York and Los Angeles, while in Southern California, Chicano chefs, such as chef Carlos Salgado, whose Taco Maria was awarded a Michelin star in 2019, carried the banner of “Alta California” cuisine.
Here, that movement was heralded by Cala, from Gabriela Cámara, whose Contramar is the other leading light of Mexico City’s fine dining scene, and Californios, from Val M. Cantu, currently the city’s only dedicated Mexican tasting menu restaurant. Both set new standards for Mexican food in the Bay Area when they opened in 2015. Two years later, Californios became the first Mexican restaurant in the country to receive two Michelin stars. Since then, however, while Mexican fine dining never stopped booming in L.A (Holbox) and New York (Corima) and New Orleans (Acamaya), in the Bay Area, Cala has closed and little else has opened, leaving a void between the Bay Area’s burrito bounty and Cantu’s meditative Cal-Mexican cooking.
Into this fallow scene arrives Maria Isabel, the Bay Area’s most ambitious new Mexican restaurant to open in years. It builds on the Californian and Mexico City influences of the last decade while establishing new depths of Mexican food and drink for the region. From Laura and Sayat Ozyilmaz, the couple behind the acclaimed Dalida in the Presidio, Maria Isabel equally reflects Laura’s life in Mexico — her childhood in Acapulco, studies in Mexico City, honeymoon in Oaxaca — and the couple’s years working at Michelin-starred kitchens around the globe, such as Eleven Madison Park in New York City, Mugaritz in Spain and Saison in San Francisco…