Chefs Laura and Sayat Ozyilmaz are set to open their second restaurant Maria Isabel (opens in new tab) on March 3. A few weeks before, they’re moving around their new kitchen with ease — a rhythm that didn’t develop by accident. Laura is at the plancha, pressing balls of pink-tinged xocoyul masa, laying them flat and flipping them with the muscle memory of someone who grew up making tortillas. She presses on one, and it puffs dramatically. Sayat, a native of Turkey who has just put on one of Maria Isabel’s freshly unboxed pink aprons, gives his own tortilla a try. It balloons on cue.
Laura rewards her husband with a little compliment: Good job! He beams like she stuck a gold star on his forehead.
Sayat knows a lot is at stake when it comes to the tortillas, as humble as they might be. At Maria Isabel, the star of the menu is the masa — sourced from a variety of Mexico-grown heirloom corn from Masienda (opens in new tab), nixtamalized in-house, ground fresh, pressed, and cooked to order. Laura, who grew up in the Mexican state of Guerrero, talks about corn less as an ingredient and more like currency. “The economy there moves around the price of tortillas,” she says.
Apparently, so does love. “Mexicans say if you cannot make tortillas, you cannot get married.” Sayat admits that when he met Laura he knew nothing about making tortillas. She married him anyway.
Heirloom-corn masa is nixtamalized and ground in-house.
Laura learned to make tortillas while growing up in Mexico.
Every tortilla at Maria Isabel will cooked to order.
It would be tempting to ascribe Maria Isabel strictly to Laura. The menu draws from the former “Top Chef” contestant’s Mexican heritage and is named for her mother and sister. The Presidio Heights space, layered in painted florals, sunset-orange glassware, and dusty-rose-flecked terrazzo, is unapologetically feminine.
But Laura and her husband, whose eastern Mediterranean cooking anchors their Presidio hit Dalida, have built their reputation on collaboration. Even when one of their homeland cuisines takes center stage, they are not just very good at cooking — they’re good at working together.
This has placed them among San Francisco’s power couples of the stove — the kind who make working with your spouse look like a smart strategic decision rather than a divorce waiting to happen. Stuart Brioza and Nicole Krasinski of State Bird Provisions, Sarah and Evan Rich of Rich Table, Annie and Craig Stoll of Delfina, Lindsay and Michael Tusk of Quince: These duos run some of the city’s most celebrated and ambitious restaurant groups. But what separates Laura and Sayat is the delicate yet dynamic balance they embody — one marriage, two culinary identities.
If Dalida was Sayat’s Mediterranean love letter, Maria Isabel is Laura’s to her coastal Mexico. But the two get most animated about the overlap.
Take their use of purslane, which they buy from Zarate Family Farm (opens in new tab), run by Oaxacan growers in Petaluma. Sayat grew up eating the succulent stewed with herbs and meat and topped with yogurt. Laura remembers it folded into green chorizo. “A lot of different cultures share similar things,” Sayat says, delighted by the connection. Mention nixtamalization, and he is off, tracing ash-cooking techniques from Mesoamerica to Mesopotamia like he’s defending a dissertation.
When the two met in 2014 while attending the Culinary Institute of America at Hyde Park in New York, Laura was 25 and had just come back from staging at the famed Mugaritz in northern Spain. Sayat, six years older, was choosing between jobs at two acclaimed restaurants in New York City.
“I was deciding between Le Bernardin and another Michelin-starred place,” he recalls. “And I thought, I should go for the best — so I chose Le Bernardin. In the same way, I thought, why am I dating all these other girls when I could be with Laura?” Faced with a talented beauty with a deep, all-consuming love for cooking, he acted swiftly: “I had to close the deal.” They were married six months later.
Sayat gets a lesson in tortillas from his wife. | Source: Alexa Treviño for SF Standard
Artichoke tetelas with white mole. | Source: Alexa Treviño for SF Standard
Before Dalida made the sleepy Presidio an actual dining destination, the couple had already tested San Francisco’s appetite for their culinary partnership. In 2019, they opened Noosh on Fillmore Street, a casual Mediterranean restaurant that leaned into Sayat’s Turkish roots. Their exit was followed by some drama (opens in new tab), but not before the couple had built a following.
The idea of opening a Mexican restaurant has been pillow talk for “years, so many years,” Laura says. The initial plan was to open a Middle Eastern taco concept, specializing in tacos árabes, a Puebla-born dish inspired by the shawarma brought over by Lebanese immigrants and served in a pita-like flatbread.
But that was then. Today, a legion of San Francisco diners have made the pilgrimage to Mexico City’s acclaimed restaurants — or, at least, have it at the top of their to-do list. They’ve experienced the metropolis’s modern, high-end Mexican restaurants. Some of the city’s most acclaimed dining destinations are also owned by female restaurateurs, including Gabriela Cámara of Contramar and Elena Reygadas of Rosetta. It’s no coincidence that Rosetta is an equally feminine space, with walls painted with vines and florals. Laura gushes, “Elena is such an inspiration.”
Isabel Baer/Postcard Communications
Isabel Baer/Postcard Communications
San Franciscans are now primed to go beyond the Ozyilmazes’ initial, more casual, taco concept, the couple believe. “I think this is the right time for us,” says Sayat. (It’s worth noting that Laura isn’t the only one in her family running a cross-cultural kitchen. Her sister owns Jowong (opens in new tab) in Mexico City, a Korean restaurant inflected with Mexican flavors, run with her Korean American husband.)
The Maria Isabel menu pulls from Laura’s upbringing in Guerrero and her father’s Sinaloan background, all expressed with California seasonality. Duck carnitas are sauced, divorciados-style, in a dramatic color block of smoky mole negro and shimmering, coppery manchamanteles, a fruit-based mole that highlights whatever is in season, from persimmons to strawberries. A triangular tetela, a tortilla filled with thin slices of local artichoke — a vegetable Laura she had only eaten out of a can before she and Sayat moved here in 2016 — sits atop a mild mole blanco. There will be starters of aqua chiles and ceviches as well as a tortita ahogada, a sandwich stuffed with crab, charred pineapple, and chiles “drowned” in a guajillo and crab sauce.
The wine list nods to Baja and Querétaro alongside California producers, and the cocktail program, led by consulting bar director Evan Williams, looks well beyond tequila, drawing on mezcal, sotol, bacanora, and raicilla.
Enmoladas with mole negro and manchamanteles. | Source: Alexa Treviño for SF Standard
Pedro Páramo, an
avocado-washed corn whiskey cocktail with peanut amaro, corn, piloncillo, cacao and smoked chili. | Source: Alexa Treviño for SF Standard
“Somebody once told me that the older you get, the more attached you feel to your roots and your cuisine. And then you want to showcase it,” says Laura, 35. She clearly misses her family back in Mexico but hopes that Isabel Maria will draw a borrowed Mexican family, just like Dalida has become a refuge for people with Middle Eastern and Jewish backgrounds.
The two signed a 15-year lease on the busy corner of Presidio and California, so they’re committed. And even though Maria Isabel is a collaboration, Sayat has no problem letting Laura step into the spotlight. They don’t have children, but they do have their restaurants. “This is our new baby,” says Sayat. “But I’m okay being the operations guy at this point.”
He also knows his wife’s temperament. “Laura will get it done,” he laughs, emulating the throaty growl of someone bullishly forging ahead. “Sometimes, all I have to do is stay out of her way and remove the obstacles.”