Mr. Isabella, 42, seems to spend each day checking on an existing restaurant, peeking at a behind-schedule construction site, meeting with a catering client. He zooms back and forth in his black Range Rover, dragging on a cigarette between stops and musing aloud about something that has to be done that isn’t being done but might be done, or not.

“I have so much in my head,” he said on a recent afternoon, lamenting the absence of his assistant, who sends emails simultaneously transcribing whatever pops out.

He grew up in New Jersey and studied at the now-closed Restaurant School of New York, and spent the early part of his career along the Acela corridor, working in fine dining in New York before heading to Philadelphia, where he cooked for, among others, the chef Marcus Samuelsson and the prolific restaurateur Stephen Starr.

After a brief stint in Atlanta, where Mr. Isabella learned about Greek flavors and techniques, he came to Washington in 2007 to work at Mr. Andrés’s eastern-Mediterranean restaurant Zaytinya. “We wanted to be closer to home but not in our hometowns,” he said, referring to New Jersey and Pennsylvania, where his wife, Stacy, was raised.

IN 2009, Mr. Isabella, then head chef at Zaytinya, met Mr. Colicchio at the home of the cookbook writer Joan Nathan, where he cooked a dinner in honor of President Obama’s first inauguration. (Mr. Colicchio had to perform the Heimlich maneuver on Ms. Nathan after an incident involving Persian shish kebab, but that’s another story.)

Mr. Isabella turned on his signature confidence, pressing the “Top Chef” judge to let him in. “I could already tell he had an outsized personality and was very ambitious,” Mr. Colicchio said.