Oriana, the name, first crops up in literature as a term of praise. The Triumphs of Oriana is a 17th-century collection of madrigals — multipart, a cappella tributes — all dedicated to the glory of Elizabeth I. The name likely alludes to the sun, from the Latin oriens (“rising”), a sometimes metaphor for the queen. In the four centuries since, Oriana has bobbed mostly below the surface of the historical record. Hark! It rises yet to christen a grand dining room in Nolita.
This Oriana, all 5,000 square feet of it, leans into the celestial associations. The establishment’s sun-and-moon logo is generously deployed, etched into discs of soft yogurt butter and onto the square faces of the ice cubes in guests’ cocktails. But the laudatory sense is here, too: Oriana has a hidden-in-plain-sight patron. The restaurant’s financier, and the building’s owner, is tech entrepreneur and investor Kevin Ryan.
Oriana’s public-facing proprietors are its chef, Andy Quinn, and its sommelier, Cedric Nicaise, longtime collaborators who met in the trenches of Eleven Madison Park and run the Noortwyck, a West Village treasure whose Michelin-starred bona fides do not stand in the way of burger specials at the bar and a thoroughly excellent roast chicken. There’s a very nice chicken at Oriana, too, smoked over cherrywood and nesting on a sodden slice of sourdough worth its bronzy weight in schmaltz. There’s even as good a flap of salmon as I’ve had recently, buttered well beyond its usual recognition as a diet option. Fittingly, the energy at Oriana tilts away from the usual and toward the showcase.
You can eat very well at Oriana. A whole duck, priced at $165, is a production, its crown aged 14 days, then smoked and served with a mustardy barbecue sauce, its leg meat mixed with gizzards and foie gras and ground into sausage, coins of which arrive on a separate platter adorned with the poor duck’s still-billed head. Does it matter that the platter of breast, though rosily marbled, exhausted our interest halfway through eating it? (I have no complaints about the sausage, deliciously rank.) Or that one side dish, a baked potato from the grill’s ashy coals, is studded with but not necessarily improved by smoked bone marrow?
Oriana’s technically precise food — like a coal-baked potato with bone marrow and platter of rosy duck breast — matches the polished setting. Hugo Yu.
Oriana’s technically precise food — like a coal-baked potato with bone marrow and platter of rosy duck breast — matches the polished setting. Hugo Yu.
If the Noortwyck is that rare thing, an overachieving neighborhood bistro, Oriana is that less rare one: a supersize sequel. Quinn has described Oriana as a “much more ambitious project,” bigger in basically all respects: larger footprint, larger kitchen, larger jets of open flame sparking cinematically therein. Oriana’s greater ambitions are more extravagant and expensive than the Noortwyck’s. Its canvas is bigger; your bill will be, too.
There are some 7,000 bottles in the cellar and two separate private dining rooms down there. The art on the walls — all except the 25-foot-long multi-panel work by Tunji Adeniyi-Jones commissioned for the restaurant, called Oriana — comes from Ryan’s private collection (he has a thing for Yale M.F.A.’s). The design, contra the Noortwyck’s homey patina of scuff, is finessed almost to a fault: The place has the feel of a luxury hotel; the collection of artworks, architectural details, and significant light fixtures — metallic cone pendants, a blue porthole like a James Turrell Skyspace to nowhere — convey a kind of kooky, slightly alien Salone del Mobile chic.
Quinn’s cooking is as technically excellent as it has ever been, often creatively executed. His take on raw tuna turns a thin sheet of carpaccio into a beet-red blanket hiding little batons of rhubarb and a tonnatoish anchovy sauce; what could be a throwaway appetizer of mushrooms is instead a deceptively beige arrangement of honeycombed morels stuffed with green garlic on top of locally milled grits, the dull color scheme disguising explosively earthy flavor. During my meals, I wished for more of that — that cleverness, that microscaled intensity, ambition executed at knuckle scale. Those grits moved me more than a $49 entrée of white asparagus covered with shaved truffles and bathed with taleggio cream.
Must “more ambition” in a restaurant necessarily translate to more expense? It’s impossible to fight this reality, and it makes me all the more grateful for the small, manageable Noortwycks of the world, the humble servants of their neighbors, where excellence can be infused into the smallest things. There are flashes of it here. In Quinn’s morels. In Nicaise and his staff’s nimble stewarding of the gargantuan wine list, pulling out humbler gems (an excellent 2016 Didier Fornerol Côte de Nuits-Villages). And in pastry chef Mary-Grace Hardy’s unmissable bread course, a knish-shaped, sourdough-like puck oiled and griddled to resemble the best pizza-place garlic knot you could ever encounter. It’s a triumph of Oriana.
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