Ignacio Mattos is the Invisible Chef. By most measures, his restaurants have become some of the most influential and acclaimed in New York City. Yet unlike so many chefs who crave recognition, the Uruguayan native seems to go out of his way to keep a low profile. So low that he does not appear on Wikipedia’s list of famous Uruguayans. (But maybe that’s a good thing?)
Mattos, 44, burst onto the scene in 2013 when he opened Estela in a cramped, second-floor space on Houston Street (so cramped that coat check was—and continues to be—a clothing rack outside the entrance). As much a restaurant as a wine bar, it featured deceptively simple but idiosyncratic dishes such as steak tartare (actually bison) and an endive salad that invited the diner to stuff the leaves with cheese and nuts, taco-style.
Estela quickly earned a Michelin star as well as a place on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list. Everyone wanted to eat there—even Barack and Michelle Obama popped up from Washington for date night one evening while he was president.
Over the ensuing decade, as Estela cemented its reputation as one of the most original restaurants of the past 10 years, Mattos proceeded to open a string of equally influential, and raved-about, places. There was Altro Paradiso, his spin on a refined Italian restaurant, opened in 2016 in SoHo, and, a year later, the seafood-focused Flora Bar, his beloved project in the Breuer building, which closed in March 2020, a casualty of the pandemic.
In 2021 came Lodi, which gave Rockefeller Center its little version of a classic Milanese café. And this year he gave Dimes Square a trifecta of greatness with Corner Bar, his perfect take on a French bistro; the Swan Room, a cocktail lounge; and his newest, the soon-to-be-opened Amado Grill, his first foray into fine dining (all three of which are inside the Nine Orchard hotel).
Yet while the profiles of his restaurants burn bright in the dining scene, Mattos’s remains almost nonexistent. So much so that in a city that can’t get enough of chefs as brands, Mattos can go unrecognized in his own restaurants—even if he sits front and center near the entrance to Altro Paradiso, as he did on a recent Wednesday afternoon with me, happily watching customers pass him by, many of them perhaps mistaking the man in a blue French chore coat to be not the genius behind a mini-empire but just some guy from the neighborhood having a quiet lunch.
A server appears and I order fried artichokes and the cacio e pepe, figuring we will tuck into more than a few of his best dishes, but when the server looks to Mattos he orders soup. And nothing else.
“I love soup,” Mattos says as he looks around the room. “I would eat it every day, for every meal, if I could.”
“Why?,” I ask.
“It’s all you need. Soup can seem like only the beginning of a meal, but made correctly, it’s everything. It’s food at its best. Full of life.”
The Making of Mattos
Spend enough time with Mattos and it’s clear he’s not just the Invisible Chef, he’s also a Philosopher Chef. Mattos speaks softly and tends to swallow his smile. He seems like a man from a different time. There’s a gentleness. He takes his time answering questions. You can see him thinking. He is, in his own words, “a brooder.”
The server reappears with his soup, and Mattos stirs it slowly with his spoon, the beans bobbing in the broth, steam rising. “My grandmother taught me that lesson about soup,” he says. “For me, with food, it’s all about the lessons I learned at her table.”
His grandmother’s table was on a farm outside Montevideo, Uruguay. Her family was from Liguria and immigrated to South America, where she and Mattos’s grandfather, whose family was from Galicia, ran a dairy farm. Mattos grew up there and says that he learned his work ethic from his grandparents.
“A dairy farm is the hardest kind of farm there is,” he says. “The work never, ever stops. There is always something to be done. And when I was a kid, even if there was nothing to be done, no one would let me pause. My mother would look at me and say, ‘Nothing to do? Go pick rocks.’ And she meant it. And I would.”
“For me, with food, it’s all about the lessons I learned at [my grandmother’s] table.”
Mattos, who is the eldest of three, was raised primarily by his grandparents because his father, whom he describes as “a psychotic, alcoholic mess,” was unreliable. When Mattos was 16, his father left.
“I threw him out,” Mattos clarifies. “He was being abusive to my mother. Someone had to stand up to him. So I asked him to leave. And he did.”
His father’s absence made him feel an even heavier sense of responsibility—he was now in charge of the family—but also gave him great shame. “Everything my father did was a lie,” Mattos says. “If my friends asked where he was or what happened, I deflected. It was my way of not confronting the shame.”
One place he knew he could always find comfort was his grandmother’s kitchen. “She always made sure there was a beautiful lunch,” he says. “Her table was a place of manners. Values. Those are things she instilled in me. Her rules shaped me. There was something about that table … all of it. The place setting … the flowers. All of it signaled community. Belonging. That something more was expected of you.” He pauses. “Just the feel of the tablecloth under your hand, on your fingertips....” He shakes his head and gives me a wistful smile. “Saudade.”
“What’s that?,” I ask.
“It’s Portuguese. I don’t know if there’s a translation for it. It’s about yearning. Missing someone. Or maybe ‘love that remains’ is what some people say.”
“Her table was a place of manners. Values. Those are things she instilled in me. Her rules shaped me.”
A year after Mattos told his father to leave the farm, Mattos’s mother cast out her eldest son.
“I guess I was misbehaving. Getting into trouble. Things you do when you’re 16,” he says. “I don’t know. Maybe after I told my father to leave it was too much responsibility? I don’t know.”
He went to live with friends whose parents let him stay with them. To make money, he took a job on the overnight shift of a catering company where his only co-workers were two old ladies. “I look back at that all the time and think how lucky I was. I didn’t learn anything about the ‘gastronomic world,’ but these two women were an example of what this business is all about. Kindness. Pride. Hard work. And with them I learned that I loved cooking and wanted to become a chef.”
A year later, at 17, he made his way to Florianópolis, a town in Brazil, where he knocked around with friends, before returning to Montevideo, where he attended culinary school at night and landed an internship at Hotel del Prado. It was there that he met Michel Kéréver, who had been the chef at Maxim’s in Paris in its heyday and a mentor to Alain Passard. “It was the first time I ever heard French. Chef Michel was so elegant. He wore a coat and tie. I stuck to him like glue and observed and absorbed.”
Then, in 1998, he met the man who would blow his life wide open—Francis Mallmann, the brilliant Argentinean chef who showed the world the power of cooking with fire at Los Negros, his landmark restaurant in the tiny Uruguayan town of Garzón. Mattos had been sent there on an internship. He stayed six years.
In many ways, Mattos’s time with Mallmann was like his graduate school. Los Negros was the place that shaped his love of cooking but also ignited his passion for ideas and art and books. It was like a food-world version of Hogwarts—there was a lighthouse and a big fisherman’s house, and there were rooms stuffed with books and record albums and walls with poetry written on them. It was the first time Mattos had seen cookbooks.
“I didn’t grow up sophisticated,” he says. “And it was fascinating to me to see that it was possible to bring literature, music, and food together in one place. I felt I was finally where I belonged. I was with a group of people I could relate to: young and traveled and talented and hungry.”
He helped Mallmann open two restaurants, including Patagonia West, on Long Island, and says Mallmann taught him how to be comfortable with uncertainty, “to find romance in whatever life gives you.” He saw how Mallmann could “sleep anywhere” and, like his grandfather, did any job that needed to be done, rather than wait for someone to do it. “Francis gave me a sense of purpose. He showed me how to be accountable. Not just to others but most of all to myself.”
After his time with Mallmann, he went to San Francisco, where he staged for Judy Rogers, the chef behind Café Zuni, and then went to work for Alice Waters at Chez Panisse. “Alice helped me find my confidence. And her kitchen was amazing. Everyone as a team. Judy taught me how to smell. How to taste. Truly. Deeply.”
From San Francisco he went to New York City in 2006, where he put Il Buco Alimentari on the map with unforgettable pastas and flavorful meats, and then worked at Isa in Williamsburg.
“A few years after that, I thought I should go out on my own.” He shrugs. “It was important for me to break away from my past. To do it in New York City? I wanted that. So I did Estela.”
His vision, he says, is the same now as it was then: simple.
“All I am trying to do is make people happy. I want people to say, ‘This place is great.’ All this stuff right now in the food world is a distraction.These days, the most abnormal thing wins. People are trying too hard to impress. The whole scene is over-fetishized. No one brings honor to the field anymore. The media demands new and creative things. But what we are getting is not creative or even good. I don’t want to taste or eat an experiment. So many chefs are catering to an endless circle of nothingness. I think hospitality is a noble thing. People forget that. When I started, all I wanted was to build a business with a strong foundation. Without that, you truly have nothing.”
Mattos shrugs again, takes another sip of his soup.
“Romance Will Save Us”
Mattos possesses the same rugged handsomeness of Javier Bardem, with a head that looks like it was chiseled from stone. He has a reputation for intensity and says he can look at someone on his staff and size them up and, more importantly, know if they have what it takes to get to the top of the field. “That’s what I live for,” he says, “to share the passion with someone who is as hungry now as I was then.”
His deepest passion these days is saved for his two sons, Paco, 12, and Paz, who is seven months old, as well as his partner, Laila Gohar, the Egyptian-born food designer who regularly collaborates on installations with luxury brands including Hermès and Byredo.
The pair came together during the pandemic, yet it was, as Mattos puts it, “complicated.” And not because of lockdown. He and his former wife had been close friends with Gohar and her partner. “At the time, I didn’t know what was happening. Neither of us did,” Mattos says. “We hung out. We were friends. But then we fell in love. We couldn’t stop it. We’d disappear for 17 hours. Just to be together. Like two kids.”
Mattos says that Gohar opened up another world for him. “I had to surrender to the fact that I deserved this thing. Love. Happiness. You don’t think at first you can handle that level of intimacy. But then I realized how much it had been lacking. I think I have a love of romance. Romance will save us as a species.”
He and Gohar and the two boys spent part of the past summer in Turkey and Egypt. He says that they’ve talked about creating something that combines their passions: “Maybe a restaurant that floats down the Nile. Where you are not just tasting, but aware of all the senses. The smells, the sights, the sounds, the water beneath you, taking you. A restaurant that would move slow, move through time.”
“All this stuff right now in the food world is a distraction.... I don’t want to taste or eat an experiment.”
He thinks a lot, too, about his past and the people who have shaped him on his journey. He tells me, “We need to stop glorifying the chef and see it instead as what it is for many people: a career. I want to do something for 12- to 16-year-olds. I can’t fix the past, but I can maybe fix the future.”
Toward the end of our lunch, Mattos says that sometimes his memory is not accurate. “But if I taste something, I remember it forever.”
I ask him if he has a dish whose taste transports him to a memory.
“When I was on the farm, my grandmother made pasta with a ragù. It was incredible. I close my eyes … and I can taste it. Still.”
“So do you make it for yourself now?,” I ask.
“I make it. But I never try to do it exactly the same, for fear I will do it better. I don’t want to ruin the memory of that taste. So I do my version. My homage to her.”
“Saudade?,” I ask.
“Saudade,” he says.
Michael Hainey is a Writer at Large at AIR MAIL and a co-host of its Morning Meeting podcast
