A Michelin star follows José Ramirez-Ruiz. Before opening his Amenia bistro, Isabela, in 2025, he was chef and partner at Semilla, the acclaimed 18-seat Brooklyn tasting-menu restaurant that earned a star before closing in 2017. He warns: “Isabela is not a Michelin star place. People might think we are offering a city experience, when we are not really trying to.”
What he is building is a countryside restaurant with serious food, serious service, and enough range for someone to come in for a $6 beer or a $1,500 bottle of wine. Isabela pays attention to details—think folded napkins, careful pacing—but the goal is not formality. “At the end of the day when you come here,” he says, “you’ll be welcome just like family.”
Speaking of family, Isabela is named for Ramirez-Ruiz’s hometown in Puerto Rico. The restaurant is built around a philosophy he calls cocina de cercanías, or “kitchen of the nearby.” That means cooking where farms, mills, fisheries, distilleries, and makers are close enough to shape the restaurant’s daily offerings. “When I went to Europe, I just fell in love with the way cooking happens in small towns, outside of big cities,” he says. “In order to produce the highest level of cuisine, you have to be closer to the source.”
In Amenia, that can mean asparagus from McEnroe Organic Farm, minutes up the road, arriving just hours after harvest. After 25 years of cooking, Ramirez-Ruiz says it took opening Isabela to see asparagus “over a foot long and not be tough at all.” He learned that the woody bottoms he once assumed were normal often result from refrigeration, dehydration, or late harvesting. Being outside New York City also gives him room to age fish, smoke in-house, and work with other small purveyors.
The local approach means leaving some standard ingredients out. Isabela does not use olive oil or citrus because neither grows nearby. Instead, the kitchen uses a house blend of cold-pressed oils from an organic grain farm in Ancram; some of that farm’s grain also goes to Milestone Mill in Kingston, where Isabela sources its flour. “Once I’m able to get away from the preconceived notions of what a product should taste like, let’s say an aioli, and then just embrace the fact that it’s just a little bit different, it only ends up, in my view, better,” Ramirez-Ruiz says.
Puerto Rican influences run through the food, though not always obviously. One example is mojo, a garlic-heavy Puerto Rican sauce made with oil, cilantro, oregano, cumin, and fennel. At Isabela, it appears with a 20-ounce New York strip. It also acts as a base flavor for dishes like trout with fiddleheads, asparagus, peas, and baby spinach. “Without the mojo, it just wouldn’t taste the same,” he says.
Escabeche is another example. Ramirez-Ruiz remembers his grandmother making quail or chicken in escabeche, a vinegar-and-oil preparation with garlic, onions, herbs, and aromatics that also preserves food. At Isabela, that memory shows up through mushrooms in escabeche: seared mushrooms and smoked onions in a sharp, garlicky marinade.
Recently, those Puerto Rican roots have become more on-the-sleeve. Twice this year—for Super Bowl Sunday on February 8 and Isabela’s first anniversary on March 22—the restaurant scrapped its regular format for a buffet-style Puerto Rican menu with tostones, rice and beans, vegetables in escabeche, and louder weekend music.
Isabela has also expanded its bar menu, added $2 chicken wings alongside $2 oysters, and introduced outdoor seating. “Our bar room is separate from the dining room, unlike most restaurants, so we try to create a bit of a different ambiance,” says Ramirez-Ruiz. “I’m super excited about that, because you can go to the dining room and order a 1986 Chateau Margot, but also go to the bar and get $2 chicken wings and watch the Knicks play in the Finals.”
Isabela’s local focus extends to staffing as well as sourcing. Ramirez-Ruiz lives about 20 minutes away in Kent, Connecticut, and notes that everyone on staff lives within 40 minutes of the restaurant. “Our job is not to offer a finalized product,” he says. “Our job is to train. The product that everybody who comes in through the doors experiences is actually the byproduct of training. Any attention Isabela has received is not because of me, but because of the individuals who have devoted themselves to training.”
Ultimately, Ramirez-Ruiz is not trying to transplant a city restaurant to Amenia. He wants Isabela to be, as he puts it, “just a really good restaurant in the Hudson Valley.”
