Listen Brooklyn

Chicha, the Delicious New Nicaraguan Restaurant That Caters to Millennial Cliché | The New Yorker

"If you avoid the view through the front windows—of a low, graffiti-covered building, parked cars, and scraggly power lines—it's easy to imagine Chicha, a new Nicaraguan restaurant in Bushwick, in a high-end hotel, with a pool, or even the ocean just out of frame. The clientele looked like background actors hired for atmosphere—multiple men in floral-print short-sleeved shirts, multiple women in straw hats—and the decor leans fully into a glossy editorial vibe, with beachy pale-pink tabletops and pineapple- and palm-tree-printed cushions along a slatted-wood banquette; the restaurant's website even commands “GRAM-IT DAMNIT.” Opened by a Nicaraguan-American and her husband (whose previous venture was a grilled-cheese shop), Chicha bills itself as New York's only restaurant devoted to Nicaraguan cuisine, and although the menu includes a note—“We know these aren't familiar dishes. Let us answer your questions or recommend our favorites!”—that feels largely unnecessary because the food is plated and described to feel familiar, even using creative-agency copy like “Face it, plants taste good, too. These are the greens you deserve.” On the plate, arroz con pollo arrives as Italian arancini, a clever, successful mashup that amplifies the crisp-edged texture; the churrasco is a seared skirt steak, nearly as silky as roasted eggplant, served with a nest of shoestring yucca fries and a zesty blended jalapeño sauce; and a baked half chicken, crusted to evoke a type of Nicaraguan pastry, is pretty much indistinguishable from standard oven-fried chicken. What comes out of the kitchen is mostly delicious, and I found the bar especially great, with an encyclopedic selection of rum and a handful of cocktails on draft, including a rum and house-made kola-nut soda—but on the whole Chicha feels oddly frictionless and unsurprising, like an advertisement enticing tourists to an all-inclusive luxury resort; it's unfair to expect one restaurant to represent an entire country's cuisine, and someone will just have to open another." - Hannah Goldfield