O

ne of Brenda Lisiotti’s earliest connections to food was as an adolescent, in a science lab, looking at the cells of an onion skin. “I loved it and found it all spectacular and I wanted to know more,” she says. This anecdote is surely a sign of the microscopic focus and detail that the future chef would apply into her successful career. Now the Executive Chef for Son Bunyola, Richard Branson’s grand, historic hotel in the Tramuntana Mountains, Lisiotti is putting her sharp focus onto every aspect of the food programme of this five-star property, along with Marta Pellicer, the director of the restaurants. 

Lisiotti was raised mostly in Italy, with a few years spent in the United States and in Argentina, where she has family. “I always loved to eat as a child,” she says, “and I grew up eating a lot of Italian food, with my father cooking meals in the kitchen.” She went to hospitality school in Italy for five years, where she was able to learn every facet of the business, with a special focus on professional cooking. Discouraged by the experience of being a woman working in a restaurant in Italy, she left for Ibiza, working for five years on the island, by the end of which, she was head chef in a traditional Ibizian restaurant; But she knew she could do more and enrolled in Mallorca’s UIB Hosteleria post-graduate program in 2012. From here, she went on to train with Michelin-starred Chef Fernando Arellano for ten years, including working at the renowned Zaranda restaurant, an experience that furthered her understanding and appreciation of seasonal ingredients and minimal intervention to highlight their qualities.

Lisiotti took over as Executive Chef at Son Bunyola at the beginning of the 2024 season, where she had been a sous-chef. This will be her first season where her full vision as a chef will be felt and tasted across the property. She’s created a new menu for Sa Terrassa, the more casual restaurant, that balances the needs and tastes of an international clientele, with seasonal ingredients and traditions of Mallorcan cuisine. At Sa Tafona, the more high-level restaurant that offers seasonal tasting menus, she and Pellicer want to tell a story through food about the Mediterranean – not just of Mallorca’s relationship to it, but of the twenty-three countries that connect to this region, from Morocco to Croatia, Italy to Lebanon. One of her favourite dishes developed on this reflection was connected to pizza. “I realised that this is such a Mediterranean food, yet never something that I thought of as such.” What developed is ‘Burrata stuffed with dried tomatoes and basil (molded carasau bread) Burrata rellena de tomate seco y albahaca (pan carassau moldeado), inspired by pizza, but completely unique. “We warm and fill up a piece of burrata with dried tomatoes, kalamata olives and basil. Then, we infused cherry tomatoes with tomato vinaigrette and we finish it with a sauce of green olives,” she describes.