When it comes to Las Vegas restaurants, the taste speech tends to travel inward, not out. At each level of dining, from inexpensive concatenation to ultra-luxe destination, the metropolis 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 subdivision of the downtown Manhattan pizzeria Scarr’s; hell, determination was adjacent a Rao’s, for a while, and it was really beauteous casual to get a array there. The metropolis absorbs these establishments and past does what it does to everything: amplifies, simplifies, suspends successful amber.
Now the Las Vegas edifice Golden Steer, an icon of the Sin City steak-house scene, has opened successful New York City. Seeing the migration tally successful the different direction—Vegas to the world—feels astir off-kilter, a small unnerving, though not uncompelling. If immoderate Vegas-endemic edifice were going to effort the crossing, Golden Steer is the 1 to bash it: it has the branding, and the mythology, and surely the constituent of view. Opened, successful 1958, arsenic a cowboy-themed joint, the edifice was off-Strip, freestanding, deliberately removed from the casino satellite it served. The city’s hotels, inactive rigidly racially segregated, wouldn’t let Black performers to dine successful the precise venues wherever they headlined, but the Golden Steer, a stand-alone restaurant, did not abide by specified restrictions, truthful it became the favored post-show spot of the Rat Pack: Sammy Davis, Jr., would clasp tribunal astatine booth No. 20, Dean Martin astatine No. 21, Frank Sinatra astatine No. 22. Their beingness drew different celebrities: Elvis liked to bid an off-menu hamburger; Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio shared a favourite array portion they were married; aft their divorce, Marilyn staked retired a abstracted spot, close successful beforehand of Joe. Booth No. 11 is dedicated to Oscar Goodman, the notorious mob lawyer and eventual politician of Las Vegas, whose Golden Steer dinners with Tony (the Ant) Spilotro were dramatized successful Scorsese’s “Casino.” (Goodman, ever the showman, played himself.) In the fractional period since its heyday, the edifice has layered a 2nd motif implicit its nominal cowboy getup: it’s a memorial to Old Las Vegas, earlier a veneer of family-friendliness settled implicit the municipality similar a quality filter. What it sells, today, is not steak but nostalgia—a specific, gaudy, morally analyzable American infinitesimal that the remainder of Vegas has mostly paved over.
A edifice similar this, arriving successful New York, mightiness consciousness purpose-made for the touristic vacuousness of Times Square. But Golden Steer has alternatively opened downtown, astatine the weighty Art Deco code of 1 Fifth Avenue, conscionable supra Washington Square Park, and with this positioning it strives for an unexpected gravitas, a seriousness of intent that a midtown code couldn’t person provided. The low-ceilinged, labyrinthine abstraction (previously lodging Mark Forgione’s One Fifth, and earlier that the much-beloved Batali pizza associated Otto) is each acheronian glamour, a eating country of appealingly cigar-ish masculinity. Here, arsenic successful Las Vegas, the edifice is simply a depository of sorts, but it works: it’s zazzy, it’s kitschy, it’s fun. Tuxedoed servers deterioration playing-card pins connected their lapels; a slot instrumentality successful the entryway shaped similar a life-size Doc Holliday gazes astatine diners with uncanny intensity. Frosted-glass sconces connected the walls carnivore bas-relief nudes successful classical repose. The theatre of it all—the silly drama, the amusement—has survived the cross-country determination gloriously intact.
The food, too, is overmuch similar it is successful Las Vegas, though this is not arsenic thrilling an facet of the facsimile. There are a fewer genuinely precocious points, similar a garlicky appetizer of shrimp de Jonghe, the butter-drenched crustaceans tender and astir shockingly enormous, oregon a steak tartare punched up with tart, pickly giardiniera. (Interestingly, though possibly accidentally, some of these dishes evoke Chicago.). Roast chickenhearted successful a Marsala condiment is made with the glamorously déplacé “airline cut” of the bird: a deboned bosom with the drumette of the helping inactive attached. I saw different tables laden with tremendous lobster tails and Flintstonian tomahawk steaks, though for sheer effect nary could vie with the reality-distorting wide of a loaded baked potato, which the paper confidently heralds arsenic “Vegas’s largest,” and which I’m beauteous definite could clasp that rubric successful New York arsenic well. Less striking was the tableside Caesar salad, which, for each its attraction and flourish—an à-la-minute dressing made with caller ovum yolk and piquant anchovies, caller shavings of Parmigiano—is undone by the banality of its vessel, a heavy solid crockery vessel with each the glamour of a restaurant-supply store. Most disappointing are the steaks themselves: Golden Steer wet-ages its meat, which softens the fibers, possibly excessively much: my sixteen-ounce Shorthorn (the menu’s word for a New York strip) was arsenic yielding arsenic a filet mignon—disconcerting, not delightful—and, upon slicing, near a puddle of diluted jus connected the plate.
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