If you are an admirer of Houston St., moved by its struggle to rise above a history of drugs, alcohol, and indie rock, reveling in the hilarity of tourists mispronouncing the name, grateful for the existence of Katz's pastrami, you might enjoy finding your way to Estela.
The restaurant is at 47 E. Houston, an address packed with possibilities. On the ground floor is Botanica, a dimly lit bar where to my knowledge nothing requiring sunlight grows. To the left of the bar is a baleful entranceway, the door held open during my visits with a shiny yellow cord, the kind psychos use to tie corpses to bedposts on Law & Order: SVU.
Come right in.
Looming before you is a long flight of narrow stairs ornamented with aged black-and-white tile, a suggestion that flophouse accommodations await above. This is not Keith-McNally-style ambience, a startlingly realistic replica of what was. This is historic Houston St., still breathing hoarsely, still kind of alive.
Up the steps you go. You'll be relieved to discover that Estela is on the first landing—dinner is served, as they say in hotel lingo, on the mezzanine level.
The restaurant is entirely nontoxic. In fact, it's a brand new construction, airy and surprisingly tame. Bistro-style globe lights. Marble tabletops. Exposed brick. Votive candles, mirrors, white plates. You know the look. A bar stretching from the middle of the room to the front window has so much space behind it that the bartenders could fit cots there, create a mini-flophouse of their own. In my three visits I was titillated by the surroundings only once, by a woman sitting at the bar with color-coordinated bra and tattoos, both neon pink. Estela looks more Houston (pronounced Houston) than Houston (pronounced House-ton) Street.
After a minute or two, I understood Estela quite well. It is one of those increasingly rare restaurants—one that will rise or fall not on ambience or hype, but on the talents of the chef.
In the kitchen is Ignacio Mattos, possibly the world's pre-eminent Uruguayan-born chef, not that the competition is plentiful. Mattos became known here for his cooking at Brooklyn's Isa, by all accounts simple, quirky, and brilliant. Then he was known for his exit from Isa, by all accounts controversial.
Estela's menu is curiously assembled, to say the least. The dishes are arranged, according to my inadequate grasp of the explanation offered by our otherwise articulate waitress, in a manner that has something to do with the size of the portions and something to do with the heartiness of the ingredients. That results in the ricotta dumplings (big portion, delicate texture) turning up adjacent to the croquettes of blood sausage (tiny portion, big flavors). Makes no sense to me.
Both items have their virtues. The blood sausage—a beloved foodstuff in meat-mad Uruguay—is rich and spicy yet altogether tame. There's nothing to dread and a lot to like. The ricotta dumplings are impressively light and accompanied by an extraordinarily generous heap of shaved white button mushrooms that have no taste at all. Perhaps that is deliberate, intended to emphasize the delicacy of the dumplings. Or maybe better mushrooms would help.
There I was, enjoying a nice enough meal, drinking an $8 glass of a good Spanish white from a small sherry glass, which I've never liked even for sherry, admiring the sassy and attentive service, thinking pleasant but dispassionate thoughts, when the quail arrived. It was served split down the middle, which means one breast. Also, one foot. And one head.
You don't see birds served this way every day, although the trend is spreading. If you're unsettled by fish with heads attached, you've got more to worry about. Not everybody gets a head, of course. There's only one per two servings. This time, we were the lucky ones.
The quail—it looked like a little dead dragon—came with a pile of chickpeas plus nettles and yogurt. A friend said the dish reminded her of Tiny Tim's Christmas dinner, one scraggly bird plucked off a rooftop with a net to feed a family of eight Cratchits.
None of that mattered, The quail was spectacular, blazingly wonderful. Not just the presentation, but also the too-few tiny bites—sweet and savory and moist and gone. I wouldn't call them mouthfuls.
I was happily ready for meals to come. Mattos was clearly something different, certainly daring, possibly special.
***
I couldn't wait to go back. We had an 8 p.m. reservation on a Thursday night, when restaurants are as busy as they get. Estela was four-deep in places where it had room for two-deep. Food took forever to arrive. Empty plates remained on tables too long. Flatware was infrequently changed between courses. Our four-course meal took four hours, from the time we walked in until we walked out.
We ordered a snack of anchovies and matzo, the unleavened bread of the Jewish Passover. I didn't make too much of the combo, since on another night it was whipped cod and matzo. Mattos is ever-curious, ever-dissatisfied, ever-challenged, compelled to alter dishes. The matzo tasted like a tortilla chip. Maybe that's what matzo tastes like in Uruguay.
The quail was better than ever—the chickpeas were gone, and in their place were peaches and huckleberries. Calamari a la plancha, a specialty of the Uruguayan resort of Punta del Este, was dazzlingly gentle on our first visit, tough this time. Cod came out too cool. Pork was overcooked.
I deliberately made my final reservation for 6 p.m., as early as possible, before the masses marched in. I remained curious about Mattos, eager to see him at his best.
We asked to dine far up front, where the jumbo bar dominates and there is room for only two undersized tables. Ours was custom-made in the shape of a trapezoid and fit snugly against a sharply angled wall. One friend, a Houston Street devotee, insisted we sit there so she could stare out the window at the brightly lit Old Navy sign that looms over the street. She found it endlessly fascinating, the way Bostonians feel about the Citgo sign high above Fenway Park. Makes no sense to me.
Beef tartare looked like breakfast cereal: granola with dried, chopped goji berries. It was crunchy, salty, briny, fruity, and spicy, a flavor combination that deserves a classification of its own. Not umami. Something else. Maybe it was just pure Mattos, never playing it safe. Burrata was unusual, somewhat rustic, not the smooth stuff flown in from Rome by restaurants that make you pay too much for it. It was draped with sweet potato leaves. I bit into one and wished I hadn't. Perhaps it was there for decorative purposes only.
I rarely order steak in restaurants anymore; the quality of the meat depresses me. But Mattos has fashioned what could be the steak dish of the century. The two slices of rib-eye were thick, juicy, meltingly magnificent. Accompanying them were long, thin halves of miniature eggplant draped with anchovies, a dining synergy I hadn't experienced before. There were leeks, too. They didn't look like leeks. They were chopped up. This dish had everything I admired plus a bonus, a taste of the charring so beloved in Uruguay.
We had two wines from the ambitious and well-priced list assembled by co-owner Thomas Carter, formerly the wine director of Blue Hill at Stone Barns. I was enticed by the 2011 Weiser-Künstler Enkircher Ellergrub Riesling Spätlese trocken. I don't just like saying all those words, although it's certainly fun. I love Rieslings that are dry, pure, and delicate. We got real glasses, too, the Burgundian kind that comes with every wine by the bottle. The 2012 La Grande Colline "Le Canon," a Syrah from northern Rhone, was an impossibly good deal, priced at $36.
The desserts were a little too good to be true, inasmuch as the restaurant doesn't have a pastry chef. Turns out a former pastry chef at Blue Hill, Alex Grunert, advises the Estela kitchen. He's a good man to have around. These were homemade desserts that nobody can make at home. The chocolate sorbet came with extra-crunchy crumb-cake topping. The panna cotta—the dessert every restaurant is making this year—was topped with honey and possessed a creaminess that puts it up with the best.
If there is anything wrong with Estela, it's that it allows too many people to come to dinner, but Mattos's cooking is so exuberant, original, unconventional, and compelling, I don't know how you can keep them away. I don't even know what to call his food. Maybe contemporary, but that's so yesterday. I don't think it's Uruguayan. I've been there, and I never ate anything as extraordinary as this.
The restaurant is at 47 E. Houston, an address packed with possibilities. On the ground floor is Botanica, a dimly lit bar where to my knowledge nothing requiring sunlight grows. To the left of the bar is a baleful entranceway, the door held open during my visits with a shiny yellow cord, the kind psychos use to tie corpses to bedposts on Law & Order: SVU.
Come right in.
Looming before you is a long flight of narrow stairs ornamented with aged black-and-white tile, a suggestion that flophouse accommodations await above. This is not Keith-McNally-style ambience, a startlingly realistic replica of what was. This is historic Houston St., still breathing hoarsely, still kind of alive.
Up the steps you go. You'll be relieved to discover that Estela is on the first landing—dinner is served, as they say in hotel lingo, on the mezzanine level.
The restaurant is entirely nontoxic. In fact, it's a brand new construction, airy and surprisingly tame. Bistro-style globe lights. Marble tabletops. Exposed brick. Votive candles, mirrors, white plates. You know the look. A bar stretching from the middle of the room to the front window has so much space behind it that the bartenders could fit cots there, create a mini-flophouse of their own. In my three visits I was titillated by the surroundings only once, by a woman sitting at the bar with color-coordinated bra and tattoos, both neon pink. Estela looks more Houston (pronounced Houston) than Houston (pronounced House-ton) Street.
After a minute or two, I understood Estela quite well. It is one of those increasingly rare restaurants—one that will rise or fall not on ambience or hype, but on the talents of the chef.
In the kitchen is Ignacio Mattos, possibly the world's pre-eminent Uruguayan-born chef, not that the competition is plentiful. Mattos became known here for his cooking at Brooklyn's Isa, by all accounts simple, quirky, and brilliant. Then he was known for his exit from Isa, by all accounts controversial.
Estela's menu is curiously assembled, to say the least. The dishes are arranged, according to my inadequate grasp of the explanation offered by our otherwise articulate waitress, in a manner that has something to do with the size of the portions and something to do with the heartiness of the ingredients. That results in the ricotta dumplings (big portion, delicate texture) turning up adjacent to the croquettes of blood sausage (tiny portion, big flavors). Makes no sense to me.
Both items have their virtues. The blood sausage—a beloved foodstuff in meat-mad Uruguay—is rich and spicy yet altogether tame. There's nothing to dread and a lot to like. The ricotta dumplings are impressively light and accompanied by an extraordinarily generous heap of shaved white button mushrooms that have no taste at all. Perhaps that is deliberate, intended to emphasize the delicacy of the dumplings. Or maybe better mushrooms would help.
There I was, enjoying a nice enough meal, drinking an $8 glass of a good Spanish white from a small sherry glass, which I've never liked even for sherry, admiring the sassy and attentive service, thinking pleasant but dispassionate thoughts, when the quail arrived. It was served split down the middle, which means one breast. Also, one foot. And one head.
You don't see birds served this way every day, although the trend is spreading. If you're unsettled by fish with heads attached, you've got more to worry about. Not everybody gets a head, of course. There's only one per two servings. This time, we were the lucky ones.
The quail—it looked like a little dead dragon—came with a pile of chickpeas plus nettles and yogurt. A friend said the dish reminded her of Tiny Tim's Christmas dinner, one scraggly bird plucked off a rooftop with a net to feed a family of eight Cratchits.
None of that mattered, The quail was spectacular, blazingly wonderful. Not just the presentation, but also the too-few tiny bites—sweet and savory and moist and gone. I wouldn't call them mouthfuls.
I was happily ready for meals to come. Mattos was clearly something different, certainly daring, possibly special.
***
I couldn't wait to go back. We had an 8 p.m. reservation on a Thursday night, when restaurants are as busy as they get. Estela was four-deep in places where it had room for two-deep. Food took forever to arrive. Empty plates remained on tables too long. Flatware was infrequently changed between courses. Our four-course meal took four hours, from the time we walked in until we walked out.
We ordered a snack of anchovies and matzo, the unleavened bread of the Jewish Passover. I didn't make too much of the combo, since on another night it was whipped cod and matzo. Mattos is ever-curious, ever-dissatisfied, ever-challenged, compelled to alter dishes. The matzo tasted like a tortilla chip. Maybe that's what matzo tastes like in Uruguay.
The quail was better than ever—the chickpeas were gone, and in their place were peaches and huckleberries. Calamari a la plancha, a specialty of the Uruguayan resort of Punta del Este, was dazzlingly gentle on our first visit, tough this time. Cod came out too cool. Pork was overcooked.
I deliberately made my final reservation for 6 p.m., as early as possible, before the masses marched in. I remained curious about Mattos, eager to see him at his best.
We asked to dine far up front, where the jumbo bar dominates and there is room for only two undersized tables. Ours was custom-made in the shape of a trapezoid and fit snugly against a sharply angled wall. One friend, a Houston Street devotee, insisted we sit there so she could stare out the window at the brightly lit Old Navy sign that looms over the street. She found it endlessly fascinating, the way Bostonians feel about the Citgo sign high above Fenway Park. Makes no sense to me.
Beef tartare looked like breakfast cereal: granola with dried, chopped goji berries. It was crunchy, salty, briny, fruity, and spicy, a flavor combination that deserves a classification of its own. Not umami. Something else. Maybe it was just pure Mattos, never playing it safe. Burrata was unusual, somewhat rustic, not the smooth stuff flown in from Rome by restaurants that make you pay too much for it. It was draped with sweet potato leaves. I bit into one and wished I hadn't. Perhaps it was there for decorative purposes only.
I rarely order steak in restaurants anymore; the quality of the meat depresses me. But Mattos has fashioned what could be the steak dish of the century. The two slices of rib-eye were thick, juicy, meltingly magnificent. Accompanying them were long, thin halves of miniature eggplant draped with anchovies, a dining synergy I hadn't experienced before. There were leeks, too. They didn't look like leeks. They were chopped up. This dish had everything I admired plus a bonus, a taste of the charring so beloved in Uruguay.
We had two wines from the ambitious and well-priced list assembled by co-owner Thomas Carter, formerly the wine director of Blue Hill at Stone Barns. I was enticed by the 2011 Weiser-Künstler Enkircher Ellergrub Riesling Spätlese trocken. I don't just like saying all those words, although it's certainly fun. I love Rieslings that are dry, pure, and delicate. We got real glasses, too, the Burgundian kind that comes with every wine by the bottle. The 2012 La Grande Colline "Le Canon," a Syrah from northern Rhone, was an impossibly good deal, priced at $36.
The desserts were a little too good to be true, inasmuch as the restaurant doesn't have a pastry chef. Turns out a former pastry chef at Blue Hill, Alex Grunert, advises the Estela kitchen. He's a good man to have around. These were homemade desserts that nobody can make at home. The chocolate sorbet came with extra-crunchy crumb-cake topping. The panna cotta—the dessert every restaurant is making this year—was topped with honey and possessed a creaminess that puts it up with the best.
If there is anything wrong with Estela, it's that it allows too many people to come to dinner, but Mattos's cooking is so exuberant, original, unconventional, and compelling, I don't know how you can keep them away. I don't even know what to call his food. Maybe contemporary, but that's so yesterday. I don't think it's Uruguayan. I've been there, and I never ate anything as extraordinary as this.
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