Cafe Altro Paradiso is Chef Ignacio Mattos and wine guy Thomas Carter's follow-up to their wildly successful Estela. Before becoming a star at Estela, Chef Mattos cooked at the ill-fated New ______ restaurant Isa in Brooklyn. He said that at this new place, he wanted to cook straight-out Italian.
The world missing from that last sentence is "again". Because the place Chef Mattos first attracted attention in New York, before he opened at Isa, was Il Buco. Quality went way up at Il Buco when he started there -- and dropped when he left. So although Chef Mattos is South American by birth