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Through most of the twentieth century, the American steak house was the ne plus ultra of expense-account dining and billfold flexing. In many places, it remains so: the nicest joint in town, the only place to celebrate a milestone or to close a deal. But over time, in some cities, New York among them, the totemic simplicity of a man eating a steak fell out of fashion, replaced by more heterogeneous modes of conspicuous connoisseurship: nouvelle cuisine, the auteur-chef tasting menu, the thousand-dollar omakase, the members-only supper club. It wouldn’t be right to say that the steak house is back, since it never really went away, but there’s something in the water, and in the air, and in the newspapers, and in the pit of everyone’s stomach. Hemlines are dropping, or are they rising? The trend feels, if not promising, by any means, at least narratively cohesive: the rise of trad wives, the end of the flu vaccine, “quiet luxury,” the return of polio, the return of Donald Trump and his taste for, among other dubious things, well-done meat. To a person of a certain stripe, perhaps bored of being asked to broaden his horizons or consider experiences outside his own, the resurgence of the steak house, with its familiar social and gastronomic codes, forged in the fires of the mid-century middle class—Father at the office, Mother at the kitchen sink—might come as a restoration of the proper order, a glorious, carnivorous relief.
A veal chop.
New York has always been a steak-house town, even when steak houses weren’t cool. Arising from the working-class chophouses and upper-class beefsteak supper clubs of the Victorian era, the city’s more classical institutions wear their mythologies with the ostentatiousness of a rib eye’s fat cap: Luger with its surly waiters and Teutonic brusqueness; Keen’s with its theatre-world pedigree and its collection of clay pipes; Delmonico’s with its long-reaching history; Sparks with its sidewalk bloodstains. The newcomers sport somewhat more varied identities: 4 Charles, a charismatic clubbiness; Cote, a K-BBQ sleekness; Quality Meats, a party-bro cacophony; Carne Mare, an Italianate opulence. Crane Club, which opened late last year in the soaring space that once housed Mario Batali’s Del Posto, seems to be going all-in on a sort of pan-European maximalism. Time and Tide, another new joint, has described itself as a “steakhouse for seafood,” with concordantly incoherent results.
A Caesar salad, prepared tableside.
By a long shot, the most exciting new steak house in New York right now is La Tête d’Or by Daniel, the latest restaurant from the indefatigable French chef and restaurateur Daniel Boulud, who for more than three decades has embodied the soigné sophistication of ultra-high-end dining in New York. Daniel, his namesake establishment on the Upper East Side, a colonnaded sanctum of caviar and white linen, has remained both gastronomically and culturally relevant since its opening, in 1993. His dozen-odd other restaurants in town, from the sleek, Mediterranean-inflected Boulud Sud (currently closed for renovations) to the fast-casual Épicerie Boulud cafés, have in common a clarity and a classicism, a sense of fluid, almost rapturous perfectionism. Boulud restaurants never come across as stale—a remarkable accomplishment, given both the length of his career and the beige-cashmere wealth of his core clientele—though they also rarely attain a sense of trendiness or urgency. La Tête d’Or may be his first foray, in quite a long time, that feels buzzy, even hot.
La Tête d’Or, as a steak house, is inherently and intensely American, though Boulud has dressed the place up in somewhat French tailoring—French onion soup is soupe à l’oignon; the restaurant’s name, which translates to “the golden head,” is a reference to the largest, most beautiful public park in Boulud’s native city of Lyon. Housed on the lobby level of a Flatiron office tower, La Tête is Boulud’s farthest-downtown restaurant, though there’s little downtown about the restaurant itself: it is vast, formal, and luxurious, trés Boulud, from the plush, hotel-like reception area to the plush, burgundy-swathed lounge to the plush, sweeping dining room decorated in brown marble and blue velvet. The ceilings soar, the art is large and muted and gently abstract, the white linens on the tables glow like cream in the halo of Art Deco sconces and dramatically tubular chandeliers.
The steak house (a “restaurant concept” if ever there were one) is built from such well-worn tropes—whiskey, iceberg wedges, myoglobin, leather—that it’s impossible for a new iteration to avoid at least winking conspiratorially at those defining elements, if not embracing them wholeheartedly. Boulud and crew seem, here, to be particularly interested in playing with the genre’s built-in theatricality. A proscenium-size cutout in one wall reveals a dreamy tableau of a steak-house kitchen: butcher block and white tile, countertops artfully arranged with carnelian hunks of meat. It’s mostly for show: the real action of the real kitchen is hidden behind the rear wall of the diorama, though movement is visible, occasionally, around the edges of the backdrop, and white-jacketed cooks occasionally step into the show kitchen, plating and finishing this or that with the stoic composure of actors playing out a silent scene. A horizontal line of mirrors mounted periscopically across the top of the aperture allows diners to gaze at the workstations without any need to leave their very comfortable seats. Besides, much of the action comes to you: several of the restaurant’s dishes are prepared or plated tableside, on wheeled carts that servers glide showily around the dining room, dispensing Caesar salad and Dover sole in intimate command performances.
Putting on a performance is no sin; I adore a dining room that knows it’s a stage. After all, we customers perform, too, especially at a steak house. Is the piece of meat large enough? Marbled enough? Rare enough? The meal is a constant, anxious audition: for the choicest cut, the hardest sear, the blackest caviar, the frothiest heartburn. You get the truffled baked potato not out of any desire for truffles but to demonstrate your indifference to their cost; you ask for a rib eye with a good-sized spinalis not because you’ve got any idea what that means but because you’ve heard someone say it before, and it sounded strong and intelligent and in the know. You can follow your heart when you’re at a steak house, certainly, but every mote of smoke and stitch of leather in the room is telling you to follow the rules.
At La Tête d’Or, you can skip many of the dishes listed as starters, which seem to serve mostly as space fillers, both on the menu and on the table—though I enjoyed a nice little scallop crudo with nubs of pomelo and green herbs, and a novel, New York-ish take on marrow bones, served split lengthwise and topped with squares of pastrami and dollops of sauerkraut. Far more exciting things are happening elsewhere in the lineup: chilled seafood, sweet and plump across the board, available piece by piece or piled up in a tiered plateau; a traditional Lyonnaise frisée salad—poached egg, mustard vinaigrette—given a delightful upgrade with chicken-liver croutons. (The dish is a Boulud staple, on the menu at several of his restaurants, and always thrilling.) Despite the spectacle of its tableside preparation, the Caesar salad is disappointingly bland; go instead for the “French wedge,” a Gallic take on the inevitable and iconic steak-house staple: iceberg lettuce with a Roquefort dressing, fried shallots, and, in the role traditionally played by bacon, crispy, salty bits of smoked beef tongue.
A seafood plateau.
All of that, though, is just warmup—maybe foreplay? The meat is the thrust of the thing. The restaurant offers a dozen or so cuts of beef, of various breeds and provenances, some remarkable (an olive-fed American Wagyu from Stonefall Farm), others generic (an anonymous Black Angus filet mignon, which perhaps the filet mignon eater deserves). If you don’t eat red meat, you can avail yourself of a lovely Sasso chicken or a firm-fleshed, elegantly filleted Dover-sole meunière, the fish flown in daily from Holland. Per steak-house rules, ordering a steak gets you a steak, nothing more: sides are sold separately (get the baked-potato tartiflette, decadently cheesy, the tender haricots verts amandine, and the marvellous frites), as are sauces and flavored butters.
The steaks are cut cleanly and well fired: a forty-five-day-aged rib eye had depth and a gentle funk; a Snake River Farms bavette, while a bit petite, was deep and flavorful. But the only one to get, in my book, the star of the menu, the possible raison d’être of the entire operation, is the prime rib. As the various table-service trolleys zigzag through the dining room, few diners look up from their conversations (or their phones). Not so when the wagon carting the “primal” of beef, from which each slab is sliced, comes around. Boulud takes his prime rib extremely seriously: only one primal is cooked at a time, a long, slow process that demands exacting attention; on one of my visits, a server sorrowfully conveyed the news that the most recent cut hadn’t been up to chef’s standards, and so none would be available for at least two more hours. Once carved and plated, each slice is draped on one end in a yellow veil of béarnaise from a copper pot, and on the other end in wine-dark bordelaise. The flesh of the meat shades from a carnation-pink medium-rare center to a deep, herb-scented outer crust. The near-melting fat cap shines like polished quartz. Bite for bite, it is truly one of the most beautiful steaks I’ve had the pleasure to consume, and it nearly earns every silly, self-serious flourish. Ignore the climate-ravaging effects of cattle ranching; ignore the plaque building up in your arteries; ignore the hundred-and-thirty-dollar price tag (which gets you sauces, two sides, and a black-pepper-inflected popover—something of a deal, compared with the nickel-and-dime exorbitance of a meat-and-sides meal à la carte). A well-prepared steak is goddam delicious. Why wouldn’t you want to wrap it in ritual and make it an avatar of social power? Why wouldn’t you want to return to its raw, unadorned, masculine simplicity when you feel like the well-established hierarchies of the world are threatened, when the doors to American life seem too wide open, when the old-fashioned purity of “normal” is shifting in discomfiting ways?
I doubt that Boulud means to associate his restaurant with any sort of political moment or ideological bent. Certainly, nothing on the menu or in the service seemed to communicate anything beyond polished, murmuring attentiveness. But a restaurant, like any work of art, cares little for its author’s intentions. Midway through one meal at La Tête d’Or, my companion looked around the room, dropped his voice, and said to me, “You know, I think you might be the only woman in here.” That wasn’t strictly true—we’d passed at least one lady sipping cocktails at the bar, and a few more eventually trickled in to be seated for dinner—but the room was, on each of my visits, overwhelmingly a room of men. I observed them in pairs, sniffing at a decanter of Burgundy; in quartets, loosening their ties; in thorny post-work acts of bread-breaking, chuckling at one another’s bons mots, presumably discussing getting the satellites up, or talking to Lockheed, or closing the funding round. The steak house speaks its own language, no matter how much of the menu is retitled in French.
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At the end of the meal, once all the meat is masticated and the lingering potatoes waved away, it’s time for an ice-cream sundae. It is a strict rule of the steak house that dessert should be both childlike and wondrous, a reprieve after all the posturing and peacocking that came before. A menu might offer chocolate cake, apple strudel, a slice of cheesecake, a sticky slab of bread pudding, or, as at La Tête d’Or, a selection of oven-warm cookies. But just as essential to the steak house experience as the steak itself is the sundae—complex, frilly, multicolored, slightly absurd, an indulgence earned through innocence rather than through brute force. La Tête d’Or’s features soft-serve, your choice of swirled-together chocolate and coffee or swirled-together vanilla and a seasonal fruit flavor, their alternating stripes spiralling upward like a circus tent. It’s served in a metal coupe surrounded by a roulette of toppings in little bowls: tiny marshmallows, dehydrated berries, little bits of brownie, house-made rainbow sprinkles. The ice cream is, of course, magnificent, the chocolate sauce luscious, the bits of brownie divine. But something about this version was off, unsteady, a little wrong. There was no whipped cream—is it still a sundae without it? And there was no cherry on top. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
