Inside Nolita’s Seductive New Temple to Live-Fire Cooking

Fifteen combined years under Daniel Humm at Eleven Madison Park taught chef Andy Quinn and wine director Cedric Nicaise to consider even the most minute details of a restaurant’s operation. They carried that exacting approach downtown in 2022, when they opened The Noortwyck, a laid-back New American haunt in the West Village celebrated for its seasonal cooking and an easygoing spirit. Now the pair has raised their ambitions considerably with Oriana, their new restaurant in the heart of Nolita. Here, Quinn embraces live-fire cooking on a sprawling wood-burning grill, while Nicaise oversees an expansive 7,000-bottle cellar. Their culinary chops find an equally sumptuous setting, with hotshot firm Modellus Novus (Tatiana, Golden Steer, Cote New York) transforming a 19th-century commercial building owned by tech entrepreneur and financier Kevin Ryan into a dramatic procession of dining spaces. 

The menu pays tribute to the elemental allure of live-fire cooking, something Quinn describes as a longtime calling. “With Oriana, I wanted to showcase how fire can transform ingredients, bringing clarity to delicate seafood, depth to vegetables, and a real sense of character to larger cuts,” he explains. “There is an emotion attached to cooking over live fire that cannot be replicated cooking solely with gas or induction.” Flames touch most of the menu, with peak-season produce and fresh seafood sharing space with imposing cuts of meat. The expansive grill occupies the open kitchen within close reach of the 60-seat dining room, framed by red-hot slabs of richly veined marble. 

Highlights include turbot with mussels, Chardonnay, and sea vegetables, alongside whole barbecue duck served with smoked breast and neck sausage. Quinn singles out the smoked chicken with red-eye gravy as particularly emblematic of his approach. What arrives as a seemingly straightforward half chicken requires three days of brining, lacquering, drying, and smoking; sourdough from neighboring Frenchette absorbs its juices beneath. Elsewhere, an axe-handle pork chop comes with black mustard, while white asparagus accompanies braised beans and summer truffle. Shellfish take a playful turn in a lobster Louie with toasted crumpet. 

The dining room occupies a slender Mott Street storefront, but instead of treating the elongated footprint as one continuous space, Modellus Novus divided Oriana into a succession of smaller rooms. “We didn’t want Oriana to feel like a big restaurant despite being able to seat many,” explains Jonathan Garnett, the firm’s founder and creative partner. “One of our goals was to relate to the cozier scale of the 19th-century building and others nearby, telegraphing a welcoming and intimate atmosphere to the street, while being resolutely of our time.”

Modellus Novus gave the passages between those rooms equal consideration. From the entry lobby, a long hallway traces the street-facing facade and branches toward Oriana’s two principal spaces: the cocktail lounge and main dining room. In the former, sapele paneling envelops an eat-in bar fashioned from softly illuminated honey onyx, whose amber glow tantalizes from the sidewalk. There, Nicaise’s sprawling wine program gives guests another reason to settle onto the striped velvet banquettes. More than 1,700 labels fill a list that leans European, with grower Champagne, Saint-Joseph Syrah, Alpine Schiava, and mature Sauternes among its selections. There’s even an ultra-rare Veuve Clicquot “Cuvée Commémorative du Mariage du Prince de Galles & de Lady Diana” 1975, a wine specially bottled for the wedding of Prince Charles and Princess Diana, which Nicaise attributes owning due to a busboy swiping it from the ceremony.

“It was important to create a sense of privacy and intimacy,” Garnett continues—as well as layering clever design details throughout to encourage repeated visits. “The bar can only be glimpsed; a visible corridor is a place to be; the dining room shares just enough of itself with the world; and private dining is truly private.” He means the two secluded deep-red dining rooms in the basement just beyond the cellar, one occupying a vault-like chamber within an original rubble-stone wall and artwork by Rashid Johnson; the other doubles as a listening lounge stocked with vinyl records by Rufus Wainwright, Rosanne Cash, and T Bone Burnett. Modellus Novus also peppered the journey with unexpected details meant to emerge across repeated visits, from slyly placed mirrors to a concealed turntable.

What the dining room reveals to the street offers enough intrigue to beckon curious passersby inside. Just beyond a round portal, the space comes into view beneath a monumental gridded acrylic fixture that washes the room in warm light and lends it a sultry Milanese panache. Scarlet leather banquettes line the perimeter and forge intimate corner booths crowned by an aluminum conic pendant. Vico Magistretti’s classic Paola chairs pull up to sapele tables, while striated hand-troweled plaster walls and natural linen window coverings temper the saturated palette.

Oriana’s piéce de rèsistance stretches across a wall visible from the street: a site-specific triptych by Tunji Adeniyi-Jones that bathes the dining room in luminous blues. “It’s our mission to place art in a manner that is architectural, impacting the feeling of the space as powerfully as our own design choices,” Garnett explains, having conceived the commission as “a generous act that the restaurant could share with the city.” Adeniyi-Jones answered with a saturated nocturnal garden, its cobalt and indigo foliage populated by sinuous figures and prowling jungle cats, punctuated by dazzling flashes of coral and pale blue. Across the room, another luminous gesture could easily pass for an artwork: a circular porthole glows an ethereal blue, radiating a distinctly Turrell-like aura. 

For Quinn, Oriana offered the rare opportunity to build a restaurant around an idea he had carried for years. “There was an opportunity with this restaurant to start with a blank canvas and build a dream,” he says. From the flames flickering across the open kitchen to Adeniyi-Jones’s animalistic reverie, that ambition seems to permeate the entire experience.