Oriana\u2019s public-facing proprietors are its chef, Andy Quinn, and its sommelier, Cedric Nicaise, longtime collaborators who met in the trenches of Eleven Madison Park<\/a> and run the Noortwyck<\/a>, 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\u2019s 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\u2019s even as good a flap of salmon as I\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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\u2019s ashy coals, is studded with but not necessarily improved by smoked bone marrow?<\/p>\n \n Oriana’s technically precise food \u2014 like a coal-baked potato with bone marrow and platter of rosy duck breast \u2014 matches the polished setting. Hugo Yu.\n <\/p>\n \n Oriana’s technically precise food \u2014 like a coal-baked potato with bone marrow and platter of rosy duck breast \u2014 matches the polished setting. Hugo Yu.\n <\/p>\n 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 \u201cmuch more ambitious project,\u201d bigger in basically all respects: larger footprint, larger kitchen, larger jets of open flame sparking cinematically therein. Oriana\u2019s greater ambitions are more extravagant and expensive than the Noortwyck\u2019s. Its canvas is bigger; your bill will be, too.<\/p>\n There are some 7,000 bottles in the cellar and two separate private dining rooms down there. The art on the walls \u2014 all except the 25-foot-long multi-panel work by Tunji Adeniyi-Jones commissioned for the restaurant, called Oriana \u2014 comes from Ryan\u2019s private collection (he has a thing for Yale M.F.A.\u2019s). The design, contra the Noortwyck\u2019s 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 \u2014 metallic cone pendants, a blue porthole like a James Turrell Skyspace to nowhere \u2014 convey a kind of kooky, slightly alien Salone del Mobile chic.<\/p>\n Quinn\u2019s 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 \u2014 that cleverness, that microscaled intensity, ambition executed at knuckle scale. Those grits moved me more than a $49 entr\u00e9e of white asparagus covered with shaved truffles and bathed with taleggio cream.<\/p>\n Must \u201cmore ambition\u201d in a restaurant necessarily translate to more expense? It\u2019s impossible to fight this reality, and it makes me all the more grateful for\u00a0 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\u2019s morels. In Nicaise and his staff\u2019s nimble stewarding of the gargantuan wine list, pulling out humbler gems (an excellent 2016 Didier Fornerol C\u00f4te de Nuits-Villages). And in pastry chef Mary-Grace Hardy\u2019s 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\u2019s a triumph of\u202fOriana.<\/p>\n \n Scratchpad\n <\/p>\n Oriana<\/p>\n Big-Ticket \u2018Tinis Splurge-Worthy Dusties A Faux-riana Thank you for subscribing and supporting our journalism.![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/e0589611e391f94e5567586d1fbeefe52e-PC002919-2-copy.rvertical.w570.jpg\")
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If you\u2019re more into cocktails than wine, Oriana has a wide variety, including a $148 martini service for the entire table.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s a true connoisseur\u2019s stock of old and rare liqueurs and fortified wines. Fifteen of them are available by the glass.<\/p>\n
Bear in mind that a different Oriana currently appears higher in Google\u2019s search results \u2014 a rental building on 54th Street.<\/p>\n
\n If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the , issue of
\n New York\u00a0Magazine.<\/p>\n