Oriana

An open grill anchors the main dining room in Nolita, and Matthew Schneier's pick off the menu is the morels, honeycombed and stuffed with green garlic over locally milled grits.1 Andy Quinn and Cedric Nicaise built this 5,000 square foot room after the Noortwyck.1

Why go

Molly Fitzpatrick rated the room 7.9, and her order is the grilled bread with yogurt butter, the maitake skewer over a green romesco with a sneaky heat, and a whole Dover sole in paprika-laced deviled butter with rock shrimp on top.2 Schneier rates Quinn's cooking as technically excellent and wants more of it at small scale, and the other thing he holds up is pastry chef Mary-Grace Hardy's bread course, a griddled sourdough puck he compares to the best garlic knot you will meet.1 Nicaise runs a cellar of some 7,000 bottles with two private dining rooms down there, and Schneier watched his staff pull out humbler wines rather than expensive ones.1 Dominique Roy has not eaten here and says the space looks stunning. Nicaise is his own Eleven Madison Park colleague, so take the enthusiasm as that.3

Order this / avoid

Order: the morels. Schneier: honeycombed morels stuffed with green garlic on top of locally milled grits, the dull color scheme disguising explosively earthy flavor.1
Order: the bread course, which Schneier calls a triumph of Oriana.1
Order: whatever whole fish is on. Fitzpatrick had Dover sole and calls it spectacular.2
Avoid: the whole duck at $165. Fitzpatrick says you should not feel compelled, and Schneier's platter of breast exhausted our interest halfway through eating it.2 1
Avoid: the grilled scallop at $26 a piece unless somebody else is paying.2

What locals & experts say

Matthew Schneier, New York Magazine (9 July 2026): Quinn's cooking is as technically excellent as it has ever been, often creatively executed. His reservation is about scale: I wished for more of that, that cleverness, that microscaled intensity, ambition executed at knuckle scale.1
Molly Fitzpatrick, The Infatuation (28 July 2026), rating it 7.9: lean into that fire (from a safe, strictly figurative distance), because everything it touches turns out delicious, from focaccia to a show-stopping whole fish.2
The house it came from: Quinn and Nicaise met at Eleven Madison Park and the Noortwyck holds a MICHELIN star, which is the lineage Schneier measures Oriana against.1

Good to know

Booking: book it, and take the main dining room by the grill rather than a seat away from it.2
Drinks: the martini service runs $148 for four and $296 for eight, poured tableside from a silver pitcher with the spares on ice. Fitzpatrick prefers the single Smoking Sol with mezcal and blood orange.2

Verdict

should-visit — Two named critics ate here three weeks apart in July 2026 and landed in the same place, which is a stronger record than any one rating. Both of them also tell you to skip the $165 duck.

Oriana.