Restaurant Review - Estela in NoLIta - NYTimes.com Ed Lefkowicz for The New York Times Inside Estela, the dining room is spare and intimate, and the noise level can climb steeply. If you wanted to take the measure of Ignacio Mattos's cooking at Estela, which opened on East Houston Street in June, you might look at the burrata on the menu and think: no, too easy. Anyone can slap burrata on a plate and wait for the moaning to start. But order it anyway, so you can see what happens when Mr. Mattos puts this louche, voluptuous cheese on a juice cleanse. The burrata sits like whipped cream on charred bread. Soaking into the bread and pooling around it is a brooding green liquid pressed from lovage, sorrel, celery and other foliage. It looks like something you would force yourself to drink after doing very bad things to your body. Ingesting it with burrata must be some kind of preventive medicine, the after-midnight ibuprofen with a bourbon chaser. That's not what it feels like, though. When this fatty sprawl of dairy is brought to heel with fresh and grassy vegetable juice, it becomes something you taste, not something that washes over you in a big creamy wave. It's strange but it's right. Strange food is often born from a need to kill boredom, ours or the cook's. It can keep kitchen and dining room awake through what would otherwise be another night of spaghetti and salad. Mr. Mattos's cooking at Estela has a mild case of weirdness. It is just unfamiliar enough that I had eaten about a meal and a half there before it dawned on me that nearly everything is Mediterranean, more or less. I should have seen that one coming, given that Mr. Mattos, who grew up in Uruguay, cooked at Chez Panisse for a year and Il Buco for five. The cooking is almost familiar, but not quite, and it's the little differences that get under your skin. The flatbread served with an excellent potato-thickened mash of salt cod is a rye matzo. And a whole squid and a spring onion, both griddled on a plancha and served with a reasonably traditional Romesco of red peppers and hazelnuts, look like a leathery, podlike alien creature alongside a blackened stem that snakes down the plate. The mild strangeness drew my attention to how deep and elemental the flavors of both dishes were. Mild strangeness hasn't always been Mr. Mattos's preferred line of attack. When he was the chef at Isa, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, he reveled in deep, surrealist weirdness. His best-known dish there was fried sardine skeleton, which looked as if it belonged behind glass at a museum of natural oddities. I remember rattling my jaw on nearly raw grains and getting my first taste of sweet potato leaves, which until then I had thought were poisonous. Estela, which Mr. Mattos opened with two partners, Mark Connell and a wine-guy-slash-general-manager named Thomas Carter, is far less confrontational in ways that go beyond the kitchen. Within two seconds of climbing the steps to this spare and intimate little dining room, you know that there will be a speech on how the menu works, that most of the dishes will be small, that sharing will be encouraged, that the noise level will climb steeply, that the meal will cost more than the menu prices lead you to believe. This is a particular danger if you aren't careful with wines, because Mr. Carter leads us into three-digit temptation much more often than you'd expect from a list that's relatively compact. The dishes aren't composed of pixel-size bits of food that have to be divided by laser surgery; they generally share well. This is a good start, but then Estela, like many small-plates restaurants, neglects the so-called share plates that you actually eat from if you treat each new creation from the kitchen as a serving platter. The share plates at Estela are no bigger than tea saucers, and are rarely swapped out. One night assorted juices and sauces from eight recipes swirled together before a fresh plate came along. It was like seeing eight movies projected on the same screen at once. New or bigger plates would help you to focus on the energetic crackle Mr. Mattos gives beef tartare by folding fried sunchoke chips into the raw meat, or the low growl of spice he lends to a fried egg and gigante beans by pairing them with bread cubes dunked in harissa. Ingredients that don't appear to have been tampered with often have a depth of flavor that takes you by surprise. There's the invisible pop of yuzu and grapefruit hiding inside wheels of uncooked summer squash arranged like scales over intensely sweet raw scallops and puréed avocado. There's the lemon that perks up white rounds of kohlrabi dressed, simply and wonderfully, with shards of fossa cheese, mint and crushed, toasted hazelnuts. E-mail: petewells@nytimes.com. And follow Pete Wells on Twitter: @pete_wells