2023 Portland Wine Week Chef Feature: Chef Isaul Perez of Isa Bistro
Sponsored by Buoy Local.
Portland Wine Week @ ISA Bistro:
Join ISA Bistro for a Mexican Wine Dinner on June 14!
This year for Portland Wine Week we are bringing you in to meet some of the chefs that help make our Portland Wine Week so special and make this great city so renowned for its food. We love Chefs here in Portland and are excited to bring you the Portland Wine Week Chef Showcase series brought to you by Buoy Local. The second chef in our Chef Showcase is Chef Isaul Perez.
Chef Isaul Perez, Chef/Co-Owner of Isa Bistro with his wife, Suzie Perez, located in Portland, Maine, embodies what it means to be a skilled and multifaceted chef. I had the pleasure of sitting down with him and his mother, who recently moved here from Mexico, and we talked about his love of food and how he has grown Isa Bistro in the established Portland food destination that it is today. Combining flavors of his home country of Mexico with traditional French and Italian techniques, he cooks for the guests at Isa like they are guests of his own home. Here Chef Isaul and his wife Suzie have created a restaurant where they can express their passion for wine and food in their own unique ways and share that with their community. Cooking has always been a deep passion for Isaul. Growing up watching his mother cook for his family, he developed a love for food that never stopped growing.
Isaul grew up in Mexico watching his mother cook for him and his 10 brothers and sisters. I was lucky enough to meet his lovely mother and see firsthand the impact she has had on his life and the deep love and appreciation he feels for her. Coming from a big family, sharing meals was an important part of daily life, and that has stuck with him to this day. Isaul tells me that his decision to become interested in cooking was a bit of an odd thing when he was young. As a child in Mexico, the boys didn’t do the cooking, and it was typically left to the mothers or the women of the household. Isaul didn’t subscribe; he loved to eat and couldn’t help but be absorbed by watching his mother cook for the family. He would watch and help his mother cook as much as possible, absorbing everything that he could. This passion and love for food continued to stay with him, and eventually, he moved away to explore it more.
Portland Wine Week Chef Showcase is Sponsored by Buoy Local.
In 2001 Isaul moved to New York City and began working as a dishwasher at a Mexican restaurant. There he started to “enjoy doing dishes and watching all the cooks, learning from everybody” that was around him. After two years of doing that he went to work at a French restaurant, where he tells me that, there finally his boss asked him if he wanted to learn to cook and naturally he said yes, because he loved to eat and would love to learn to cook” and there he learned how to cook French cuisine with traditional french techniques. He tells me that it was a real learning experience for him because it was totally different from what he was exposed to in Mexico. After 5 years, he left and went to work at an Italian restaurant in order to learn the traditional Italian cooking techniques including making homemade pasta, which when I asked him why he made that switch he answered that it was simply because “I just really loved homemade pastas.” Which in my opinion is the best reason to learn anything.
With such a diverse background of influences it only makes sense it would lead to him having such an interesting and eclectic menu that is always changing with the flow is Isaul’s imagination and the seasons. “That's why we call it Isa bistro!” he tells me. It’s a place where he feels comfortable to express himself on a plate however he chooses. When I asked him how he creates his menu he told me simply that “what we do here is everything we like to eat, sometimes we like to eat like pork chops or steaks or homemade pasta, you know whatever we’re feeling.” He makes sure to incorporate foods from his home country as much as possible. Every Monday is Mexican Monday, where he cooks fantastic Mexican food that he grew up eating and has, in my opinion, perfected. I asked what his favorite menu item at the moment was and he told me that the lobster tostada, a delicious and totally unique representation of where he’s from and where he ended up, is a total winner.
Isa is the epitome of what a bistro was meant to be. Talking to Chef Isaul it is apparent how much this restaurant means to him and his wife Suzie. This is the restaurant that they always dreamed of opening when they were together in New York City. A place where Isaul can let his imagination run wild and cook whatever he pleases. A casual place where people can go and enjoy quality food and wine served by knowledgeable people. A place where you can feel welcomed into the company of others who also share a similar passion for quality wine and food. This they have achieved and more. Isa has become a staple of the Portland, Maine, food scene in the past few years, for good reason. Their love for sharing the enjoyment of good food with our community radiates from the bustling atmosphere of the restaurant, to every bite taken.
