The Eighty-Six Wants You to Want In
Exclusivity, like any product, gets more valuable the more people want it; it is both the cruellest and the most honest thing that a restaurant can sell. The Eighty-Six, a mega-swank steak house that opened in the West Village last fall, was, from Day One, clubby, celeb-packed, and impossible to get into—no surprise, as it’s the latest from Catch Hospitality Group, which previously brought us the impossible-to-get-into Corner Store. There are just eleven tables, and for a long while I had no interest in occupying any of them. That is, until a friend of mine—a very fancy friend—mentioned that she might be able to get me a reservation, and I was transformed, almost instantly, quite embarrassingly, into a person who had never wanted to be in any restaurant more urgently in my life. This is the confidence trick of exclusivity, and I am apparently a total mark: is there anything more alluring than a closed door that opens just for you?
The door, here, is green and weighty, with a wrought-iron grille over a central peephole, and has been here for ages. The building is the erstwhile home of the infamous speakeasy Chumley’s, and its address, 86 Bedford Street, is said to be the origin of “eighty-six,” Prohibition-era slang for “Get lost.” Like 4 Charles Prime Rib, another well-guarded mega-luxury oubliette in the West Village, with which it draws inevitable comparison, the Eighty-Six is a very good steak house. The Catch team has entirely remade the space in weighty, rich tones—dark woods, bronzed mirrors, copper velvets. A two-top, tucked into an alcove by the (working) fireplace, was purportedly the favored table of F. Scott Fitzgerald. You could, as he presumably did, get full-on blotto—an applewood-smoked Martini, theatrically poured tableside atop a stalagmite of ice grown, science-fair-style, from hyper-chilled water, is excellent, and potent as hell—but, in the sight lines of so many diners’ iPhones filming so much faux-blasé vertical content, it might be ill-advised.
While you’re browsing the menu, your server might shimmer over bearing a lacquered box, which opens to reveal gustatory treasures arranged as if for a Flemish still-life: a gracefully long-limbed Icelandic langoustine, a few extra-special cuts of beef. One of those steaks, so tightly filigreed with white fat that it glows like rose quartz, is a cross-breed of Spanish dairy cow and Japanese Wagyu which is available, our server assured us, only at the Eighty-Six—a triumph of sourcing for the chef, Michael Vignola, Catch Group’s culinary director and a bona-fide meat nerd. I was, for my sins, dining with a vegetarian, and twenty ounces felt too ambitious to tackle alone, so I went instead for the New York strip, served bone-in. The exterior, salted and peppered, crackled from a hard sear; the inside was tender pink from edge to edge. The sauces I’d ordered alongside were hardly necessary: an eggy, vinegar-tart béarnaise, and a wiggly, wobbly gelée-adjacent steak sauce made with veal demi-glace. I dipped my fries into them, at least, and enjoyed a whole phalanx of steak-house sides: garlicky spinach; butter-laden mashed potatoes; a strikingly photogenic creamed-corn potpie with a swirly croissant top; snappy green and yellow long beans, dressed in a sharp lemon vinaigrette that sliced through the density of the rest of the food.
Not every dish achieved expert levels of precision. A duo of stone-crab claws were half sublime, one pincer tender and sweet, the other stringy and bland. My companion’s sweet-potato ravioli—the only vegetarian dish, besides sides, though some meatless options are available off-menu—had a sugary filling held between oddly stiff, cardboardy sheets of pasta. There is mixed messaging, too, in the story that the Eighty-Six is telling, a tension between Old New York brawn and contemporary glitz—the speakeasy vibes and complimentary pickles versus the swoops of caviar atop warm Mimolette croquettes, the cut-glass decanters for tap water, and the vintage French steak knives. But this is the dissonance of all steak houses, really; the rough-and-ready cowboy mythology is forever at odds with the fundamental frilliness of the performance of wealth, which is built on that least manly-man of things: caring what other people think.
Helen, Help Me!
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The Eighty-Six seems unfazed by this tension, or indeed by anything at all. As at 4 Charles—and Rao’s, whose time-share system of “table rights” is the model for this sort of restaurant power-brokery—access is the main asset: the product is the door, and what a door! An impossible door! The best kind of door you can possibly enter! In a sense, it was somewhat amazing to discover that the Eighty-Six is actually good, when it really doesn’t need to be. The steak was terrific, the whole experience was ridiculous, and I absolutely want to do it again. ♦
