When the brothers and cousins who built Puesto needed advice or were juggling the existential ulcers of running their own restaurants, grandpa Isidoro was their rock. They’d talk every day. So when they built their dream restaurant—an Italian thing, recruiting some of the country’s top talent—they named it in honor of him and grandma (Marila + Isidoro = Marisi). Welcome to Marisi.
Upstairs, a team of cooks hand-rolls and cuts from-scratch pasta. A wood-fired hearth. They’re dry-aging fish. Make house-made limoncello to undo the reputational ouch of aisle-five limoncello. Their wallpaper game is strong. And on their patio, a barrel of Weller Full Proof Bourbon, aged six and a half years in Kentucky, another year and a half here in the La Jolla salt air.
Resumes aren’t everything, but spending time braising things with greats surely helps. Culinary director Erik Aranow was at Thomas Keller’s Bouchon Bistro. Drinks man Beau du Bois was beverage director at three-star Michelin, The Restaurant at Meadowood. And now they’ve added exec chef Cameron Ingle, who spent the last four years with Dan Barber at two-star Michelin Blue Hill at Stone Barns. Barber is famously obsessed with farming and using the finest raw food that the healthiest soil can possibly grow (read his book The Third Plate, you’ll never look at a bag of flour the same again). Ingle caught that fire, which may explain why he came to San Diego—small-farm capital of the U.S.
And that white peach bellini is what the devil went to Georgia for.
Get the Einkorn cavatelli. Short ribs braised for hours—meat softer than whispers about insider trading. From-scratch cavatelli made with einkorn flour—the ancient-iest of ancient grains, revered for its payload of nutrients and its lighter, less grumpy gluten. It’s like the best stew your nonna makes, tossed with hot dog bun-shaped pasta made from one of the world’s purest grains. With cheese.
