Mike Isabella - Chef of Zaytinya
In March 2007, Mike Isabella took over as head chef of Zaytinya, José Andrés’ restaurant on 7th Street specializing in mezzes, a Middle Eastern version of the tapas his Spanish restaurant Jaleo serves nearby. In June, Zaytinya won the Restaurant Association Metropolitan Washington’s award for Washington’s Hottest Bar Scene of the Year.
When Isabella stepped up onto the platform to receive the statuette with the rest of Zaytinya’s crew, it wasn’t surprising that he looked dazzled and just a little dazed. March to June is a just a turn of a menu page in restaurant time. But Andrés seems to have a golden touch for conceiving award-winning concepts and finding the team to make them work successfully. And Isabella comes from a restaurantaward-winning background.
By the time the accolade was presented, Isabella had worked on 40 percent of the menu’s recipes and changed at least 10 to 15 dishes. He was working on replacing the daily special, featuring a changing selection of the restaurant’s signature dishes, with a new section of chef suggestions. And he had been playing around with esoteric ingredients, like bottarga, a pricey pressed and salted gray mullet roe that he gets from Greece but which is also a specialty of Sicily, Sardinia and Italy’s Veneto region. It has an intensely briny taste, and he’s curious to see if his customers’ palettes will rise to its challenge. “I’m doing it a couple of different ways,” he reveals. He stares into the middle distance and his eyes glaze over as he murmurs about slicing it thin over oysters with a squeeze of lemon, shaving it over salad or perhaps serving it with a fish dish.
“We pay a lot of money for our product,” Isabella says. “For Jose Andrés and myself, it’s very much a tradition. One thing we do well is import an excellent product and execute it at a high level.”
He seems to be in his element. Working with the cuisines of countries around the Mediterranean basin has long been a dream of his. “I didn’t want to cook French, Italian or American,” he says.
Isabella is from a small Italian family and grew up in New Jersey. “I started cooking with my grandmother before I could remember cooking. I ballooned — all that traditional dining!” His mom, he discloses, was not a good cook. “But she studied different religions and traveled a lot,” so by age 6 he had learned to eat tabbouleh and stuffed grape leaves. Through dishes such as these he began to develop a palate for the unique flavors of the Middle East.
When he decided to follow a career in cooking, he took his associate’s degree in culinary arts from the New York Restaurant School (now the Art Institute of New York City) and sought out ethnic chefs to help him broaden his horizons. His eyes were opened to South American food and traditions by working with chef Douglas Rodriguez at his modern Latin restaurants El Vez and Alma de Cuba in Philadelphia.
He discovered Greek cooking under Pano Karatassos, spending two years at Kyma, the awardwinning Greek seafood restaurant in Atlanta that he left to come to Zaytinya. “I was proud to work under him. I went to Greece, to Santorini, and met up with some of his family when I was out there. The real thing I learned is that the Greeks use everything.”
Isabella waxes lyrical over Greek tomatoes, their smell from the sun, their full taste. “They do tons of sauces with tomatoes” — as he does at Zaytinya, where, just as the Greeks do, “we need feta every day.”
This brined sheep’s cheese comes to him from Epirus in northern Greece, along with other traditional Greek cheeses such as the Gruyere-like Kefalograviera, good for grilling. Isabella doesn’t tire of this food. “Once a week I try to cook Greek for my girlfriend,” he confesses.
It's probably a Sunday event, since that’s the only time off he gets. If he’s not cooking, he’s reading. “I do a lot of reading to get my head away. But a lot of that reading involves food.” He manages to work out one hour every day of the week. “If I didn’t, I would be a huge guy,” he says with a grin.
Last month he took time off in Crete, where he went on vacation last year as well. Eventually he wants to open a Greek restaurant of his own. “This cuisine is my future,” he enthuses.
Meanwhile, he’s glad to be in Washington. “It’s all a little bit different. I feel like I’m back in the mix. People are more daring in their eating. I come from Atlanta, where for the last two years it was all salmon and tuna. This place is on the road to being one of the next top cities, the hottest cities in food.”
Zaytinya (202-638-0800; http://www.zaytinya.com) is located at 701 9th St. NW. Small plates cost $4.50 to $11.95.
This article by Julia Watson first appeared in the NorthWest Current newspaper.