At last, a true "date night" restaurant besides Jackie's in downtown SS, and an upscale business lunch possibility as well. It's quiet at lunch folks! The food is ambitious and often excellent. The soups are complex and exotic. The bread pudding is irresistible. Cocktails are fun classics (mojito, pimm's cup, pisco sour), rather than ridiculous. Go to Nicaro as often as you can--we need this place.
Don't know how the Washingtonian registers an "intimate" sound level, but the only intimacy offered at this painfully noisy restaurant is the view of your companion's tonsils as they attempt to out-yell the table next to you.
The food is modern, reasonably priced, and this would be a go-to standard... except that the room is acoustically very, very bright, the tables and surfaces hard, and it's quite impossible to converse... or to ignore the yelling at the tables adjacent (or far across the room) as other diners do attempt to "converse".
What a pity. The service is highly competent and the food is really quite good. But conversation is simply impossible.
