Restaurant review, Italian Two Ways.

As the name suggests, Olana, which opened two months ago among the sooty gray office buildings along lower Madison Avenue, is a place of lofty, even romantic, ambitions. The restaurant is named for the Hudson River home of the nineteenth-century landscape painter Frederic Church, and so the windowless room is decorated with murals, some of them backlit, of bucolic Hudson River scenes. There is a round bar up front, circled with chairs covered in red mohair, and the tall wingback chairs in the dining room are covered in red mohair, too. I don’t know how many attentive waiters, sommeliers, and bread boys I encountered during my visits, but if you dine at an off hour, you might find yourself outnumbered ten to one. All of which contributes to a slightly strained stuffiness at Olana, a sense that this overpolished, overembroidered restaurant might be trying a little too hard.

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