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Narcissa used to be an easy choice anytime you couldn’t risk having a bad experience. You’d come here with a significant other the night before your first trip abroad together, or with your boss when you were trying to avoid getting moved to the basement like Milton in Office Space. The fancy-but-not-too-fancy dining room, as well as the excellent vegetable-focused small plates, made this spot inside the Standard East Village pleasing to just about everyone. But these days, there’s a new chef and a less interesting menu - and while the atmosphere still works for lots of different situations, the food has fallen off to the point that we’d hesitate to recommend it for any of them.
Narcissa is a hotel restaurant, but not the overly stuffy kind - there are no white tablecloths or paintings on loan from the baroness of a small European principality. The attractive, busy space is connected to two other bars in the Standard, where you can get drinks before or after dinner without stepping outside. It feels more polished than a lot of other East Village restaurants, with sommeliers who’ll happily explain the difference between the natural and biodynamic wines that make up the wine list, and servers attentive enough to please your mother-in-law who times how long it takes for her water glass to be refilled.
Those things haven’t changed since Narcissa first opened - but the food has. The fantastic vegetable-focused dishes that used to make Narcissa a must-visit have been replaced with more predictable seasonal American ones. Not only are many of the things on the menu - like burrata, grilled octopus, and a whole branzino - as common at hotel restaurants as left-behind business cards, but the flavors are also dialed back to the point that you’ll generally forget about them before a dish is even cleared from your table. The cavatelli is little more than an expensive plate of buttered noodles, and the burrata has the consistency of liquidy oatmeal and a flavor that reminds us of cold skim milk. The grilled octopus is dry, and the porchetta is so fatty that you pretty much need the knife skills of Edward Scissorhands to find any meat.
If you do find yourself here for dinner, you can have a decent meal assuming you stick to a few specific things. All of the fresh-baked bread is great, and the sweet potato with creamy pesto tastes like it’s been slow-cooked over a campfire (in a very good way). The fried chicken has juicy meat with crunchy skin glazed in honey, and it’s enjoyable enough that you might not even mind paying $33 for four pieces. But while it’s possible to have a pleasant time here, when you can’t risk having a bad experience, there are a lot of other spots you should consider first. Narcissa isn’t the sure bet it used to be.