A Las Vegas Steak House Tries Its Luck in New York
When it comes to Las Vegas restaurants, the cultural exchange tends to flow inward, not out. At every level of dining, from cheap chain to ultra-luxe destination, the city has imported big-name brands from elsewhere—a Spago here, a Momofuku Noodle Bar there. There’s an outpost of New Orleans’s Turkey and the Wolf, and a branch of the downtown Manhattan pizzeria Scarr’s; hell, there was even a Rao’s, for a while, and it was actually pretty easy to get a table there. The city absorbs these establishments and then does what it does to everything: amplifies, simplifies, suspends in amber.
Now the Las Vegas restaurant Golden Steer, an icon of the Sin City steak-house scene, has opened in New York City. Seeing the migration run in the other direction—Vegas to the world—feels almost off-kilter, a little unnerving, though not uncompelling. If any Vegas-endemic restaurant were going to attempt the crossing, Golden Steer is the one to do it: it has the branding, and the mythology, and certainly the point of view. Opened, in 1958, as a cowboy-themed joint, the restaurant was off-Strip, freestanding, deliberately removed from the casino world it served. The city’s hotels, still rigidly racially segregated, wouldn’t allow Black performers to dine in the very venues where they headlined, but the Golden Steer, a stand-alone restaurant, did not abide by such restrictions, so it became the favored post-show spot of the Rat Pack: Sammy Davis, Jr., would hold court at booth No. 20, Dean Martin at No. 21, Frank Sinatra at No. 22. Their presence drew other celebrities: Elvis liked to order an off-menu hamburger; Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio shared a favorite table while they were married; after their divorce, Marilyn staked out a separate spot, right in front of Joe. Booth No. 11 is dedicated to Oscar Goodman, the notorious mob attorney and eventual mayor of Las Vegas, whose Golden Steer dinners with Tony (the Ant) Spilotro were dramatized in Scorsese’s “Casino.” (Goodman, ever the showman, played himself.) In the half century since its heyday, the restaurant has layered a second motif over its nominal cowboy getup: it’s a memorial to Old Las Vegas, before a veneer of family-friendliness settled over the town like a beauty filter. What it sells, today, is not steak but nostalgia—a specific, gaudy, morally complicated American moment that the rest of Vegas has largely paved over.
A restaurant like this, arriving in New York, might feel purpose-made for the touristic vacuousness of Times Square. But Golden Steer has instead opened downtown, at the weighty Art Deco address of 1 Fifth Avenue, just above Washington Square Park, and with this positioning it strives for an unexpected gravitas, a seriousness of purpose that a midtown address couldn’t have provided. The low-ceilinged, labyrinthine space (previously housing Mark Forgione’s One Fifth, and before that the much-beloved Batali pizza joint Otto) is all dark glamour, a dining room of appealingly cigar-ish masculinity. Here, as in Las Vegas, the restaurant is a museum of sorts, but it works: it’s zazzy, it’s kitschy, it’s fun. Tuxedoed servers wear playing-card pins on their lapels; a slot machine in the entryway shaped like a life-size Doc Holliday gazes at diners with uncanny intensity. Frosted-glass sconces on the walls bear bas-relief nudes in classical repose. The theatre of it all—the silly drama, the amusement—has survived the cross-country move gloriously intact.
The food, too, is much like it is in Las Vegas, though this is not as thrilling an aspect of the facsimile. There are a few truly high points, like a garlicky appetizer of shrimp de Jonghe, the butter-drenched crustaceans tender and almost shockingly enormous, or a steak tartare punched up with tart, pickly giardiniera. (Interestingly, though perhaps accidentally, both of these dishes evoke Chicago.). Roast chicken in a Marsala sauce is made with the glamorously déplacé “airline cut” of the bird: a deboned breast with the drumette of the wing still attached. I saw other tables laden with enormous lobster tails and Flintstonian tomahawk steaks, though for sheer effect none could compete with the reality-distorting mass of a loaded baked potato, which the menu confidently heralds as “Vegas’s largest,” and which I’m pretty sure could hold that title in New York as well. Less striking was the tableside Caesar salad, which, for all its care and flourish—an à-la-minute dressing made with fresh egg yolk and piquant anchovies, fresh shavings of Parmigiano—is undone by the banality of its vessel, a thick glass salad bowl with all the glamour of a restaurant-supply store. Most disappointing are the steaks themselves: Golden Steer wet-ages its meat, which softens the fibers, perhaps too much: my sixteen-ounce Shorthorn (the menu’s term for a New York strip) was as yielding as a filet mignon—disconcerting, not delightful—and, upon slicing, left a puddle of diluted jus on the plate.
In Las Vegas, a so-so steak at the Golden Steer might matter less, given the institution’s stature. But the backstory doesn’t travel quite as seamlessly as the aesthetic; walking to and from my table in the dining room, I kept hearing snatches of back-in-the-day lore being transmitted from enthusiastic servers to diners who were only half listening, focussed instead on their dirty Martinis or on the proper arrangement of their selfies. In a city of Keens, Luger, Gallaghers, and Sparks, a new steak house trading on the grit and glory of a world gone by needs to bring more to the table than an originless filet mignon or a watery slab of prime rib. And yet I really enjoyed myself at Golden Steer, and fun is an underrated quality in a restaurant. I was particularly enamored of a front bar room—named the #1 Bar, in homage to a prior tenant of the space—a spacious, glittering box with a bronze-mirrored ceiling and showgirl fringe hanging from the chandelier. It eschews the mid-century manliness of the main dining room for more of a nineteen-eighties cocaine-cowboy mood, and it’s a total trip.
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Curiously, Golden Steer is not the only stalwart of the Vegas hospitality pantheon to have made a reverse crossing. Another recent arrival is Drai’s, a night club that became, in the early two-thousands, synonymous with Vegas excess of the bottle-service-at-4-A.M., the-floor-is-on-fire variety. It opened a New York outpost last year, on a gloomy bit of West Fourteenth Street just as it becomes the Meatpacking District. The upstairs room, a supper club, is smallish and cheaply finished; the food is an afterthought, the party never-starting. What makes the Las Vegas Drai’s work—mega-d.j.’s, mega-crowds, a sense of infinite debauchery—is not necessarily site specific; it’s a matter of cultivation. Its drab landing in the Big Apple only highlights the miraculousness of what Golden Steer has managed, watery meat notwithstanding. Sure, it’s a little goofy, and more than a little over the top, and maybe I spent more money than I meant to in exchange for a little less than I was hoping to get—but it’s a Las Vegas steak house, baby. Isn’t that the point? ♦