Dirty Work: Ignacio Mattos of Estela Makes a Ridiculously Good-Looking Crudo

Welcome back to Dirty Work, our series of dispatches from the MUNCHIES Garden. We're inviting chefs, bartenders, and personalities in the world of food and drink to explore our edible playground and make whatever the hell inspires them with our rooftop produce. The results: MUNCHIES Garden recipes for you, dear reader. This time, we hang with Ignacio Mattos of New York City's Estela, Café Altro Paradiso, and Flora Bar, who makes us just about the prettiest hemp-garnished fish crudo we ever could have imagined—and a super-easy, equally whimsical dessert to boot.

Flowers can be food. Don't forget that.

Ignacio Mattos of New York City's Estela, Altro Paradiso, and Flora Bar certainly hasn't. Anise hyssop flowers and nasturtiums are some of the first things he gravitates toward when he visits the MUNCHIES garden for an installment of Dirty Work.

Examining his loot after perusing through our patches of herbs, vegetables, fruit, and miscellany, he counts off, "Lots of flowers.. berries… chives… one jalapeño…"

Although we always try to give chefs a heads up as to what's likely to be ripe or in bloom when they visit, once they hit the garden, it's all about picking, tasting, and smelling to make the final call on what will make it into a dish.

In addition to the flowers, Mattos grabs a few handfuls of Mexican sour gherkin cucumbers and ground cherries, and if it's off to the test kitchen.

Mattos has been hard at work on the Estela cookbook, due out this fall, and the demands of print have changed his recipe development process.

"You're so close, but then suddenly you're so far," he sighs. "We've been taking our time, but the thing is, it's very different from having a restaurant. In a restaurant, you come out with a dish, but every day you're able to adjust it, so that's the mindset I have. [With a book,] once you put it down, that's it. It's a very different approach."

But today, he gets to combine spontaneity with a solid game plan. He brought fillets of fluke and uni, and also decides to "improvise a little salad" with the Mexican cucumbers, tomatoes, and berries he picked up.

Mattos starts by slicing up the fluke, then rotating the pieces and slicing them again into teeny, tiny bits, which, with their shiny translucence, suddenly resemble crystals. He brought an array of homemade accoutrements: hemp oil—hemp leaves blended into seed oil and left to marinate overnight—as well as Thai chile vinegar, kohlrabi vinegar, and yuzu kosho, a popular Japanese condiment of fermented citrus fruit and chiles.

Mattos adds a little bit of oil to bind the fluke all together, forms it into a disk, sprinkles it with a bit of salt, then tops it with a generous serving of uni, and uses tweezers to insert little pockets of yuzu kosho.

"All the seasoning's going to be 'broken,' so you get little bites as you go," Mattos says. He adds nasturtium leaves and anise hyssops flowers, as well as—yes, those are—hemp leaves. (They're just for show and peppery flavor, and won't get you stoned, before you get any ideas.)

A drizzle of hemp oil and Thai chile vinegar, and this obscenely lovely dish is ready to eat (and tastes as good as it looks). Mattos dreams of crudo.

But he isn't done. There's that improvised salad to attend to. He starts with a generous dollop of sour cream, which he flattens with the back of a spoon and surrounds with blackberries, ground cherries, and those tart and refreshing little Mexican sour gherkins.

He adds a generous sprinkle of lemon zest…

Then tops the simple, lightly sweet dish with more anise hyssop leaves and edible flowers.

Hey there, good-lookin'. Now that's what we call a perfect circle (or two).