When the Restaurants Closed, They Cooked for Each Other

Chef Ignacio Mattos had just earned a Michelin star. Now he’s struggling to feed his staff.

- By Benjamin Wallace

ON FRIDAY, March 13, as the coronavirus bore down on New York City, there was no reason to expect Estela would be busy. For the past week and a half, Ignacio Mattos’s celebrated restaurant on East Houston Street had been eerily slow with diners increasingly worried about sitting near each other in enclosed spaces. Earlier that day, something jarring had happened: A series of iconic, successful New York restaurants had closed. Eric Ripert had shut Le Bernardin, his three- Michelin-star seafood temple, and furloughed his 180 employees; Danny Meyer’s Union Square Hospitality Group had closed its 19 restaurants and laid off 2,000 employees. The previous day, the city had mandated that all restaurants cut capacity by 50 percent. At Estela, this meant its usual 13 seats at the bar were reduced to six and its 42 dining room seats to 21.

But there Estela was, humming with frenetic energy. Before the evening was out, the restaurant would serve 112 people. To fit them into half the space, managers rearranged reservations and asked customers for flexibility in giving up their tables for other diners when needed. Beautiful plates of cured fluke with uni, burrata with salsa verde and charred bread, and fried arroz negro with squid and romesco came out of the kitchen. Guests were understanding if they had to walk around the block or have a drink at the bar downstairs before their seats were ready, and the restaurant did what it could to keep the tables turning smoothly. “We’d splash them a little after-dinner drink and move them to the bar,” Mattos later said.