Cedric Nicaise Leaves The Noortwyck to Stock Oriana's 7,000-Bottle Cellar
Sommelier Cedric Nicaise has left The Noortwyck in the West Village to build a 7,000-bottle cellar of European producers for Oriana, the new wood-fired restaurant from chef Andy Quinn.
Seven thousand bottles, drawn entirely from producers across Europe, is less an inventory than a position taken long before the first table is seated, the sort of commitment that only holds up if whoever is filling the racks is playing a game in which the opponent will not show a single card until well after the wine has already been bought, shipped and laid down, which is the logic that appears to have carried sommelier Cedric Nicaise out of The Noortwyck in the West Village and into the cellar of Oriana, the new restaurant from chef Andy Quinn, built around a wood-fired grill and a menu of seasonal vegetables, fish and cuts meant to be shared among a table rather than claimed by one plate alone.
A cellar assembled at that scale behaves less like retail and more like correspondence chess, where the move is made now, in allocations secured and contracts signed years ahead with growers who will not see a cork pulled for months, and the answer comes back only later, glass by glass, whenever a guest reaches for a producer whose bottles were already resting downstairs before the dining room had finished its build-out, before the grill had been lit for the first service, before anyone outside the two men building the list knew what either of them intended.
The wager sits opposite a kitchen designed for slow heat and shared plates, vegetables and fish and cuts that ask for structure and patience rather than polish, and a European list of that depth is built to answer exactly that kind of cooking, favoring producers who reward the same waiting the grill itself requires rather than names bought for recognition alone, a pairing of two disciplines that both measure success in the time a guest is willing to give them before judging the result.
Seven thousand bottles is also seven thousand bottles of capital already spent, resting in a room before a single cork is pulled, committed in full regardless of what any guest, tonight or a year from now, chooses to order. The wine does not wait to get paid.