Oti
Romanian restaurant · Lower East Side ·
Imaginative Romanian staples, creative cocktails, and unique pickled dishes.
Imaginative Romanian staples, creative cocktails, and unique pickled dishes.
"The Romanian-inspired restaurant in the Lower East Side now has a backyard patio that can be booked on Tock. The European wines are fantastically refreshing — the team will happily offer a tasting — and they pair well with the dip-heavy menu, which includes broken burrata, zakuska (an eggplant dip), and roasted red peppers. It’s great for drinks and small plates as a pre-dinner appetizer, or you can order the entire menu and stay awhile; either way, there’s no shortage of nearby stops if you’d like to keep the evening going." - Eater Staff
"You'll know you've arrived at a modest Romanian-ish restaurant on the Lower East Side when you see the monster on the window (and on the menu, and the wall): a saffron-hued cartoon blob of a face capped with gray tasselled horns and a purple eggplant for a nose. Elyas Popa, the Romanian-born proprietor and chef, has run Oti in one form or another for about five years—first as a catering business, then as pop-ups and residencies—and in September it became a proper restaurant serving his artsy-cheffy riffs on the food of his childhood, which draws on Balkan, Ottoman, and Mediterranean influences: soft cheeses, spiced meats, mountains of fresh green herbs, and a vivid tradition of pickling and curing. In the tiny space the manager and co-owner, Dania Kim, walked me through a brief menu of three entrée-size plates and five smaller ones, explaining pairings like “broken burrata” (Romanian Telemea dressed in edible flowers) beside a pepper-and-eggplant zacuscă dip, or pickled-mushroom toast topped with char-blackened pickled hot peppers. Under Kim’s direction I paired the daily special—plump mussels cooked in a tomato-beer broth—with a bowl of mămăligă shot through with Parmesan, a combination that somehow balanced two different kinds of rich and salty textures into a mutually constructive weirdness; a plate of three lamb-and-beef meatballs topped with mustard mellowed by a swirl of miso was nicely complemented by pickled grapes, pike-sharp with apple-cider vinegar and cinnamon, clever and bizarre. Oti feels idiosyncratic without being art-directed—real-deal eccentricity in a scrappy operation held together by Popa’s sheer creative tenacity; occasional inconsistency doesn’t erase the sense that it’s ambitious and maybe on the cusp of becoming something really, really great. There’s no dessert menu, but the meal concludes with a precisely arranged rainbow of gummy bears (one bear in each color). (Dishes $9–$21.)" - Helen Rosner
"There are just a couple of Romanian restaurants in NYC, but Oti is the first to attempt a “contemporary take” on the cuisine, adding a twist or two to traditional dishes for the Lower East Side crowd. The small space looks like a repurposed bar or gallery, sparsely decorated except for the restaurant’s mascot, a furry monster mask hanging on the wall. The makeshift kitchen is no bigger than the one at your house, which makes it easy for the chef to come around from behind the counter with stories about his Romanian roots, and dishes like herby lamb meatballs or mussels in beer broth. Not everything hits, but there are some bright spots, like the polenta with miso, and the pickled grapes. Skip the tasting menu, and go for a couple a la carte snacks instead, keeping in mind that they don’t have a liquor license yet." - Neha Talreja
"A Lower East Side restaurant from Elias Popa offering Romanian dishes such as the eggplant spread zacusca, sarmale (cabbage rolls), pastries with telemea cheese, and ending dinner with a complimentary bowl of gummy bears for nostalgia." - Emma Orlow
"A modern Romanian restaurant on New York’s Lower East Side that offers a playful, chef-driven dining experience — notably promising a gummy-bear chaser at the end of each meal." - Eater Staff