The restaurateur Simon Kim opened Cote in the Flatiron district, in 2017, with an alluring conceit: a marriage of two of the great beef-worshipping restaurant genres, the Korean-barbecue joint and the American steak house. He borrowed Cote’s format from the former, with grills inset into tabletops and a classic Korean menu of meat, marinades, and banchan. From the American steak house, he adopted a certain slick-edged expense-account swagger, with dark-leather décor, a dry-aging program, a serious wine list, and European-inspired hospitality. The name itself carried a double meaning—cote, in Korean, means “flower,” or “essence,” but the word also evokes “côte de boeuf,” the French term for a standing rib roast. Within a year, Kim’s restaurant became the first Korean-barbecue place in the world to earn a Michelin star. In the time since, Kim and his company, Gracious Hospitality Management, have taken Cote global, opening outposts in Miami, Singapore, and Las Vegas—and, as of April, in midtown.

Kim seems constitutionally incapable of doing anything small; his follow-up to the original Cote, the Korean fried-chicken joint COQODAQ, also in Flatiron, became famous almost immediately for its encyclopedic champagne list, created by the group’s beverage director, Victoria James, and for its Golden Nugget, a boneless-chicken bite topped with a generous dollop of caviar. But the newest project is his grandest yet, and he knows it. “This is my Sistine Chapel,” he told Grub Street, referring to the soaring ceilings of 550 Madison, the postmodern tower in which his latest project is housed. Cote 550, as it’s called, makes up just one-third of it; the address is home to three new Gracious Hospitality restaurants, stacked vertically. Cote 550 occupies a moody subterranean space; above it is the more casual Bar Chimera, on the cathedral-like main floor; and on the mezzanine level is a not yet open sushi-omakase counter, to be helmed by the super-chef Masahiro Yoshitake, whose sushi-yas in Tokyo and Hong Kong each have multiple Michelin stars.

Diners enter the complex on Fifty-sixth Street between Fifth and Madison, an area that’s closed to car traffic owing to the presence of Trump Tower on the block’s northwestern corner. Once you’re past the barricades, pylons, and hulking N.Y.P.D. mobile checkpoint, and through the door to Bar Chimera (which you must go through to reach the other restaurants), all that jittery energy doesn’t exactly dissolve, but it does change form, into supercharged biz-cazh happy hour. The room is enormous in every dimension, with a sixty-foot atrium and vast windows overlooking Madison Avenue. From the center, a twenty-three-foot Norfolk-pine tree ascends, looking unavoidably Christmassy, surrounded by plush booths and three distinct, stage-set bar areas: one for Martinis, with mirrored backdrops and icy-white lighting; one for whiskey, warmly lit, with wooden shelves and a rolling ladder; and one dedicated to the vast and rarefied wine list, which includes a vintage Madeira dating to 1835. High up on an interior wall, in jarring contrast with the muted sandstone tones of the rest of the room, is a neon work by the artist Martin Creed proclaiming “DON’T WORRY.” Was I worried? Should I be worried?

On all my visits, the room was raucous and packed, the tables full of people who looked like they had just come from an office and were ready to take someone home. The food ranges from snacky to sizable, and the quality of dishes varies widely. Home-Run Balls, named for a popular Korean snack of the same shape, are terrific gougère puffs filled with foie-gras cream, and a spring-pea lettuce cup was clean and bright. Fried-octopus bites, though, were like chewing on a knotted hair tie, and a pairing of melon with bresaola—cured beef, standing in for the more traditional prosciutto, in what I assume was a nod to Cote’s reverence of the cow—was flat and fatty-tasting. But these are still early days, and I imagine such kitchen kinks will work themselves out. Notable on the menu is a burger, the first at a Kim joint: it’s modest in size (a plus in my book), with a medium-rare patty that’s textural and complex, plus a slim melt of American cheese with crispy Parmesan. The drinks are beautifully made, even if the multiple-bars situation creates some odd segregations on the cocktail list. (A passion-fruit-tequila cocktail is a Martini, I guess?) My only real quibble is that a drinks list this broad shouldn’t contain just three non-alcoholic cocktails, one of which turned out to just be a canned adaptogen-whatever drink, poured tableside into a glass.

The office-party vibes, thank goodness, do not follow you downstairs. Make a turn at Bar Chimera’s host stand and descend a dark and oddly narrow staircase. Then pass through a night-clubby space—Cote’s bar, where a d.j. spins party beats starting at five—and past the trippy optical-illusion rest rooms, down a pleasingly disorienting blue-neon-framed tunnel that seems to go on forever, and you’ll find yourself at Cote 550. The restaurant is flashier and more glamorous than the original, with moody black floors, discreetly spotlit tables, mirrored ceilings, and walls leafed in living greenery. In the darkness, all eyes are drawn to a small, shining pool at the center of the small, shining room, its turquoise water still and luminous. The over-all effect is intimate, sultry, very eighties, very cokey, very Nagel painting.

As at the original Cote—and all the others—the centerpiece of the menu is the Butcher’s Feast: a prix fixe that includes four cuts of meat cooked for you, by one of the restaurant’s servers, at your table’s grill. The meal comes with a wonderful assortment of banchan and sides, my favorites being a dish of chilled okra, sticky and with a bit of heat, and Cote’s justly famous scallion salad, a marvel of curlicued slivers made sweet and lightly sour from a fermented dressing. The meat, including a nice piece of hanger steak and some oddly gristly rib eye, is fine enough (if you want more and lovelier cuts, you’ll have to level up your order to the Steak Omakase), and it’s served well by the lettuces, sauces, and other bits and bobs with which you’re encouraged to eat it. The feast opens with a shiso leaf bearing a geometric cube of o-toro, dramatic and a little awkwardly large, and concludes with a cup of tangy soft serve, petite and satisfying.

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The Butcher’s Feast is more than enough for a full meal, but there are other treasures, too, like a beef-noodle soup built on a spectacularly rich, slightly offal-ish broth made with marrow bones, with paper-thin slices of A5-Wagyu rib eye swimming in it like manta rays. (You can get a cup of just the broth, for sipping, upstairs at Bar Chimera.) Also new at this Cote is a luxe japchae, whose ingredients are wheeled in on a beautiful cart bearing little bowls—noodles, vegetables julienned to pleasing uniformity, and a frankly enormous portion of sweet Alaskan-king-crab meat. “It’s our take on the tableside Caesar salad,” my server explained. (There is also a Caesar salad, in a doenjang dressing; it’s plated in the kitchen.) The japchae assembly is more mechanical than dramatic, but the servers who put it together are charming and chatty enough to carry the performance. Also charming: the cocktail menu’s hangover prophylactic, ZBiotics, a vial of clear liquid that tastes like watery yogurt, and—as far as I could tell, after downing a strong cocktail on a mostly empty stomach—actually seems to work.

One of Cote’s winky Asian-steak-house creations, also available at Bar Chimera, is a dish called Oyster “Dynamite,” a hybrid of oysters Rockefeller and seafood dynamite, the sushi-fusion clubstaurant staple. The result—oysters broiled under a dollop of mixed seafood dressed in spicy mayonnaise—is a clubstaurant dish, through and through, and I can’t really tell whether that’s something Cote is doing seriously, ironically, or totally unintentionally. Kim, a consummate macher, is still operating with more intelligence and better taste than most, and I used to think that Cote was following the Carbone model (which, in turn, seemed to mostly follow the Nobu model), expanding its business into a high-status luxury chain while maintaining much of the lightning-in-a-bottle magic that made the original so irresistibly compelling. But this latest iteration, and, indeed, the entirety of the 550 complex, makes me wonder if a more apt comparison would be to something like Tao, the ur-clubstaurant, which is so ubiquitous and so party-forward that the “-staurant” part barely registers anymore. At Cote 550, there’s a Midori sour on the cocktail list! There’s a Cosmo upstairs! “Has anyone jumped in the pool yet?” my companion asked our waiter, as he fiddled with some Wagyu on our tabletop grill. No one has. Yet. ♦