http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/11/dining/cafe-altro-paradiso-review.html 2016-09-30 17:52:49 Looks Aren’t Everything at Café Altro Paradiso The chefs Ignacio Mattos and Aidan O’Neal strip foods to their essences in SoHo. === Over the 11 or so weeks The restaurant’s carpaccio is simple and marvelous, a single piece of raw bison pounded so thin that when it is laid over small, newly fried potato chips and a mound of arugula salad, it drapes like purple silk. My picture, though, could be a close-up of a skinned knee, or an aerial shot of a dormant volcano made out of flesh. One night, a whole turbot was roasted on the bone until its skin neared blackness. Its upturned mouth and fan-shaped tail hung over the edges of a plain white plate. On the side was an off-white gob of mayonnaise in a small white dish, which did nothing to improve my picture but did taste very good on the edge of a forkful of sweet, slightly sticky fish. If you added a sprig of curly parsley, the restaurant’s lamb chop could come from a 1950s supper club. A meat with two sides, it’s barely photographable, and I’d eat it again in a minute. First, I’d go after the white shell beans cooked to the brink of collapse. Then I’d take a strip of Calabrian chile with a forkful of the chop. I might skip the slices of roasted shoulder on the side of the plate — a little tough — but not the thin curve of meat and fat that, left on the outside edge of the bone, crisped up like bacon. I’d save it for last, like an after-dinner chocolate. This can’t be an accident, the inverse relation between prettiness and deliciousness at Café Altro Paradiso. The kitchen — Aidan O’Neal is the chef de cuisine under the direction of Ignacio Mattos, the chef and an owner — seems to be trying to strip food down to the bare elements of flavor. Dressing it up again would be like tacking vinyl siding to the concrete front of Refusing to decorate its plates doesn’t seem to have hurt business. There’s been a steady flow of curious diners who know or know of Mr. Mattos’s first restaurant, Neither man was especially well known when The place quickly achieved cult status. (After President Obama For The high ceilings and the vast windows facing the peeling trunks of plane trees in a cobblestoned SoHo park suggest that eventually the dining room will be a fine place to enjoy a tranquil and possibly solitary breakfast or lunch. Only dinner is served now, and it’s far from tranquil, although the partners have clearly learned a thing or two about acoustic panels since they opened Estela. The greater comfort of this casual spinoff is a paradox, though not one anybody is going to complain about. A second paradox deserves a moment’s pause, though. In keeping with the small-plates regimen followed at Estela, most of the portions at Café Altro Paradiso are deliberately small. Servers make a point of telling you that the pasta is not the size of a main course. This could be a problem for people who walk in under the impression that they are in a normal Italian cafe. Say you were in the mood to sit at the bar with a glass of Lugana from But for now, just play the kitchen’s game and schedule pasta as a midmeal diversion. Eat the slow-cooked chicken ragù brightened with briny green olives and tossed with skinny, chewy tubes of garganelli and you should be happy. Have the near-transparent sheets of cannelloni rolled up around a light, unsoggy filling of ricotta flecked with greens, and you should be even happier. Before pasta, there is grilled bread with cut-up anchovies, chile oil and parsley on a bed of butter; or pale fennel shavings with orange zest and soft curls of good provolone; or a pink and juicy Italian sausage with fruity mustard and chopped broccoli rabe; or the carpaccio. All of it sounds ordinary but is far from it. After pasta, you might investigate that supper-club lamb chop, or the polenta and stewed onions under a lobe of calf’s liver, so creamy inside it’s like a pink organ-meat custard. I’d sidestep the thickish pork Milanese, no thrill especially when served with unsalted peas and favas. Sometimes Mr. O’Neal and Mr. Mattos manage to push simplicity in directions that seem novel. Other times, they don’t push quite hard enough, and it’s hard to tell Café Altro Paradiso apart from the hordes of other restaurants where you can have cheese and salami followed by a so-so pork cutlet. Like the portion sizes, the interestingness quotient may need fine-tuning as the restaurant grows up. This seems well within the grasp of Mr. O’Neal, who in his last job, running the kitchen at One very encouraging sign is how perceptively the pastry kitchen has located the sensuous side in some traditional Italian-cafe sweets. The dark and bittersweet chocolate-walnut torta is intense without congealing into fudge, and the rhubarb crostata has a crust that’s a pleasure on its own. Even the gelato is a nice surprise. There’s a rich and unusual one with honey and chestnuts, and another with dried figs and vin santo. It reminds me of the classic French ice cream made from prunes and Armagnac, but without the booze on its breath.