Chicca Restaurant

So my friend and I had bought a groupon for this restaurant. If you don’t know, groupon is the isht. Anyway, the deal seemed pretty sweet: 3 course meal for 2 (2 apps, 2 entrees, 2 desserts, 2 coffees). We get there and we are handed an extremely limited and poorly selected menu. I was upset because there was no mention of a limited menu… just slight price restrictions when ordering. If I had seen the «groupon» menu they gave us, I would’ve chosen a different menu. Oh well. No big deal right? The waiter comes over and he was completely awkward. He basically made us wait until we knew all 3 of our choices so he could take our order. The appetizers came out and my carpaccio was good, but my friend ordered the fried mozzarella and it tasted like freezer. Not ok. Then after waiting forever for our next course, the food came out and it looked like it had been sitting underneath a heat lamp for far too long. The chicken dish was pretty good, but the pasta dish might as well been from pizzahut. It was subpar to say the least. Finally, our dessert came out and it was just as lame. My tiramisu was all melted (do you know how long tiramisu needs to be sitting out to look melted??? A long time.) and the apple tart tasted like gerber. The only thing I can say I loved was my latte.
Food doesn’t have to be mind blowing to have a good experience if the service is exceptional, but this was awkward and lazy. My friend asked to have her food boxed, so the server picked up her plate, loaded it up with our dirty silverware, and brought it to the back. I thought he didn’t understand, until he came back with the food wrapped up. Why on God’s earth would you collect the dirty silverware from the table and put it on the plate of food we are going to take home? Not ok. Finally when they brought the check, he told us that we needed to leave a tip. Uh… thanks guy. I’m just using a groupon, i’m not a vagabond.
Oh and they only accept AMEX… so thank god we had cash on us.
Needless to say, I’m never going back there. For being in the city, this place should have been so much better. Spring St has too many cute places for this spot to be allowed to exist.

10 dollars for a bottle of Lurisia sparkling water ??? Please. This is legalized robbery. Enough with this ‘take advantage of the customer’ soho crap. Restaurateurs !!! Wake-​Up people are hurting out there. We are all fed up of being taken advantage of. Food is mediocre to decent,
Priced in the middle to high range.

My parents (party of two) went to Chicca for lunch and shared a pizza and salad. The quality of the meal was fine. However, they were a bit surprised when the bill arrived — it was handwritten and included a 20% tip. Now while this would be perfectly okay in a restaurant that stated the policy in its menu, I don’t find it appropriate when it’s not stated. Plus, at Chicca? After my dad paid, he requested the bill, which the waiter refused to provide. The waiter also would not give his name.
Certainly not impressed with this restaurant and we wont be going there again.

Other than the waiter audibly scoffing and shaking his head when we asked for a small amount of water for the pup (we were sitting outside), solid food and good amounts of it. Her crab and butter pasta was actually really good, while their pizza also looks quite good though I haven’t tried it yet. Pastas are cooked spot on, and the sauces are, while nothing mind-​blowing, totally solid.
If you can keep from going wild with the ordering, it’s a pretty cheap place to eat at considering the neighborhood.
Tip: Don’t get dessert here. When you’re done, go around the corner on Thompson St and go to Kee’s Chocolates instead.
Crème Brulee chocolate FTW!

I took a few of my kids on a walk and we found ourselves at this restaurant. The price looked right and we gave it a shot. Aside from a peculiar odor in the restaurant the food was delicious. The pasta was al dente and the sauces tasty. The thin crust pizza was done to perfection.

ONLY ACCEPTS AMEX CARDS!!!
Luckily I had enough cash on me to cover the bill for me and my friends. Chicca — this is why you are a 3 star restaurant!
Me and my friends ordered some wine, 2 appetizers, and a pizzA.
The mozarrella bubali — PERFECT.
Asparagus w/​parmesan — PERFECT.
The pizza w/​proscioutto– PERFECT.
Not one thing I would change about any one of those dishes. These are light dishes and portion sizes are just right! Food was 5 out of 5 stars!

The way I have to look at this meal is that I paid for the outdoor seating. (Which I’m not so sure is worth the $ 30+ for my small-​salad-​and-​glass-​of-​white-​wine meal… but it’s SoHo.) The location is excellent– great for people watching and sun catching– and the staff very friendly and warm.
But the menu hurts. And it’s probably not more than what you or I can pull out of our refrigerator and put together for brunch on a Saturday afternoon.
**The REAL deal-​breaker was when one of my girlfriend’s handed the server a credit card and he informed us, after our meal, that the restaurant takes ONLY AmEx. What?
Bottom line: If you’re looking for decent Italian I recommend walking the few extra blocks up the street and into Little Italy.

The food was pretty good: tropicale (salad) and Penne Chicca. My penne was a tad undercooked but perhaps I should have specified al dente? The waiter was distracted, very slow and inattentive. It took forever to get bread, even though the place was not busy by any stretch. All in all, you can do better and you can do worse than Chicca.

We are visiting NYC and this is my husband’s first visit to the city. We were walking around SoHo looking for some grub and stumbled onto this place. We ordered calamari to start and it was quite yummy. He ordered the spaghetti carbonara and it was DELICIOUS! I ordered the salad chicca and it was average. The tiramisu was equally tasty. Don’t regret finding this place!

On a beautiful Friday evening two friends and I decided to eat here because we were starving and didn’t feel like walking anymore. It had outdoor seating but we opt-​ed to sit inside so we didn’t have to wait for a table. The tables were on top of each other. The staff was wonderful. As for the food — eh — it was ok. We split the Portobello Mushroom Salad. Pretty good I must say. I got a pasta dish for my entrée that was super undercooked and had very thin, watered down sauce. However, as previously mentioned, I was starving so I ate it anyway. Prices are reasonable. What was ridiculous was that they ONLY accepted AMEX. REALLY?

Truly a pleasant surprise. We were in the neighborhood on some errands and hadn’t planned to have dinner. We stopped in Chicca on a whim on a Tuesday. The place wasn’t crowded, and the service was warm and efficient. I’d highly recommend the fresh pastas — the red sauce, meatball rigatoni was definitely a cut above the usual red sauce Italian place, and the thin crust pizza met my expectations. Overall a friendly, inexpensive neighborhood Italian.

Ugh. We regret this one. My family of four stopped into this neighborhood restaurant largely because we were attracted to the outdoor seating on Spring Street given the sunny 70 degree day. It went downhill from there.
I’ll start with the positives. The staff is great. They’re friendly, honest, and attentive.
The negatives are pretty negative. For starters, they didn’t cook our brunch there; they just reheated it. We should have been tipped off to this unfortunate fact when we asked for a couple of substitutions to one of the omelets we ordered. They don’t allow ANY substitutions because you can’t remove/​replace an ingredient in an omelet that is already cooked and is simply being reheated! When our two omelets did arrive, they were actually fritattas (evidently, an Italian omelet is actually a fritatta, or so the waiter explained). And they tasted pretty much as you’d expect day-​old reheated fritattas to taste.
I tried to wash it down with a bloody mary, but that didn’t help. The bloody mary tasted like tabasco sauce, with a little water.
We had only a few bites of our meal and paid the bill and left.
Overall, a rather pleasant spot to sit (an extra star for that) but unappetizing food. For a coffee or a simple, cool drink on a nice day, it’s a great place to try. Otherwise, keep walking.

Our reason for choosing Chicca — it had outdoor tables. We sat down and noticed that there was a price-​fixed lunch special, offering an appetizer and entrée for $ 21.95. Given that most of the lunch entrees ranged from $ 14 – 16, the price-​fixed menu wasn’t a bad deal, and many of us went for it.
To kick off the meal, I started with an old favorite that I hadn’t enjoyed in a while — calamari. It was just the way I liked it — not overly breaded, and while I prefer the rings of calamari, there was a decent mix of rings and tentacles, catering to whatever you may prefer. This was served with a marinara sauce. While described as spicy on the menu, I found that it wasn’t overly spicy, so don’t let the menu scare you off.
For the main course, I went with beet gnocchi in a gorgonzola cream sauce. This dish is on the price-​fixed menu, but not on the regular menu, and was pretty good. The beet gnocchi was light and a good alternative to the usual heavy potato dish — clearly it was light, as I ate the whole thing. The cream sauce was good as well, and light enough where I didn’t feel like I had to nap off the meal in the afternoon.
While I enjoyed my main dish, I found Chicca to be just okay and not anything outstanding. In fact, everyone at the table agreed it wasn’t fabulous, but it wasn’t bad. Service was pretty good, and the staff had a good attitude considering one of my co-​workers sent back his drink and then questioned if a Diet Coke was actually Diet, but sadly the most memorable thing to me of the meal was the fact that my gnocchi was purple due to the beets.