By an extended shot, probably the most thrilling new steak home in New York proper now’s La Tête d’Or by Daniel, the most recent restaurant from the indefatigable French chef and restaurateur Daniel Boulud, who for greater than three a long time has embodied the soigné sophistication of ultra-high-end eating in New York. Daniel, his namesake institution on the Higher East Facet, a colonnaded sanctum of caviar and white linen, has remained each gastronomically and culturally related since its opening, in 1993. His dozen-odd different eating places on the town, from the smooth, Mediterranean-inflected Boulud Sud (at the moment closed for renovations) to the fast-casual Épicerie Boulud cafés, have in frequent a readability and a classicism, a way of fluid, nearly rapturous perfectionism. Boulud eating places by no means come throughout as stale—a exceptional accomplishment, given each the size of his profession and the beige-cashmere wealth of his core clientele—although in addition they not often attain a way of trendiness or urgency. La Tête d’Or could also be his first foray, in fairly a very long time, that feels buzzy, even scorching.
La Tête d’Or, as a steak home, is inherently and intensely American, although Boulud has dressed the place up in considerably French tailoring—French onion soup is soupe à l’oignon; the restaurant’s identify, which interprets to “the golden head,” is a reference to the biggest, most lovely public park in Boulud’s native metropolis of Lyon. Housed on the foyer stage of a Flatiron workplace tower, La Tête is Boulud’s farthest-downtown restaurant, although there’s little downtown concerning the restaurant itself: it’s huge, formal, and splendid, trés Boulud, from the plush, hotel-like reception space to the plush, burgundy-swathed lounge to the plush, sweeping eating room embellished in brown marble and blue velvet. The ceilings soar, the artwork is giant and muted and gently summary, the white linens on the tables glow like cream within the halo of Artwork Deco sconces and dramatically tubular chandeliers.
The steak home (a “restaurant idea” if ever there have been one) is constructed from such well-worn tropes—whiskey, iceberg wedges, myoglobin, leather-based—that it’s unattainable for a brand new iteration to keep away from at the very least winking conspiratorially at these defining components, if not embracing them wholeheartedly. Boulud and crew appear, right here, to be significantly occupied with enjoying with the style’s built-in theatricality. A proscenium-size cutout in a single wall reveals a dreamy tableau of a steak-house kitchen: butcher block and white tile, counter tops artfully organized with carnelian hunks of meat. It’s largely for present: the actual motion of the actual kitchen is hidden behind the rear wall of the diorama, although motion is seen, sometimes, across the edges of the backdrop, and white-jacketed cooks sometimes step into the present kitchen, plating and ending this or that with the stoic composure of actors enjoying out a silent scene. A horizontal line of mirrors mounted periscopically throughout the highest of the aperture permits diners to gaze on the workstations with none want to depart their very comfy seats. Apart from, a lot of the motion involves you: a number of of the restaurant’s dishes are ready or plated tableside, on wheeled carts that servers glide showily across the eating room, meting out Caesar salad and Dover sole in intimate command performances.
Placing on a efficiency is not any sin; I like a eating room that is aware of it’s a stage. In any case, we prospects carry out, too, particularly at a steak home. Is the piece of meat giant sufficient? Marbled sufficient? Uncommon sufficient? The meal is a continuing, anxious audition: for the choicest lower, the toughest sear, the blackest caviar, the frothiest heartburn. You get the truffled baked potato not out of any need for truffles however to reveal your indifference to their value; you ask for a rib eye with a good-sized spinalis not since you’ve bought any thought what meaning however since you’ve heard somebody say it earlier than, and it sounded robust and clever and within the know. You possibly can observe your coronary heart whenever you’re at a steak home, definitely, however each mote of smoke and sew of leather-based within the room is telling you to observe the foundations.
At La Tête d’Or, you possibly can skip most of the dishes listed as starters, which appear to serve largely as house fillers, each on the menu and on the desk—although I loved a pleasant little scallop crudo with nubs of pomelo and inexperienced herbs, and a novel, New York-ish tackle marrow bones, served cut up lengthwise and topped with squares of pastrami and dollops of sauerkraut. Way more thrilling issues are occurring elsewhere within the lineup: chilled seafood, candy and plump throughout the board, accessible piece by piece or piled up in a tiered plateau; a conventional Lyonnaise frisée salad—poached egg, mustard French dressing—given a pleasant improve with chicken-liver croutons. (The dish is a Boulud staple, on the menu at a number of of his eating places, and at all times thrilling.) Regardless of the spectacle of its tableside preparation, the Caesar salad is disappointingly bland; go as an alternative for the “French wedge,” a Gallic tackle the inevitable and iconic steak-house staple: iceberg lettuce with a Roquefort dressing, fried shallots, and, within the function historically performed by bacon, crispy, salty bits of smoked beef tongue.
All of that, although, is simply warmup—possibly foreplay? The meat is the thrust of the factor. The restaurant gives a dozen or so cuts of beef, of assorted breeds and provenances, some exceptional (an olive-fed American Wagyu from Stonefall Farm), others generic (an nameless Black Angus filet mignon, which maybe the filet mignon eater deserves). In the event you don’t eat purple meat, you possibly can avail your self of a beautiful Sasso rooster or a firm-fleshed, elegantly filleted Dover-sole meunière, the fish flown in every day from Holland. Per steak-house guidelines, ordering a steak will get you a steak, nothing extra: sides are bought individually (get the baked-potato tartiflette, decadently tacky, the tender haricots verts amandine, and the marvellous frites), as are sauces and flavored butters.
The steaks are lower cleanly and nicely fired: a forty-five-day-aged rib eye had depth and a mild funk; a Snake River Farms bavette, whereas a bit petite, was deep and flavorful. However the one one to get, in my e-book, the star of the menu, the attainable raison d’être of the whole operation, is the prime rib. As the assorted table-service trolleys zigzag by way of the eating room, few diners search for from their conversations (or their telephones). Not so when the wagon carting the “primal” of beef, from which every slab is sliced, comes round. Boulud takes his prime rib extraordinarily critically: just one primal is cooked at a time, an extended, sluggish course of that calls for exacting consideration; on one among my visits, a server sorrowfully conveyed the information that the newest lower hadn’t been as much as chef’s requirements, and so none could be accessible for at the very least two extra hours. As soon as carved and plated, every slice is draped on one finish in a yellow veil of béarnaise from a copper pot, and on the opposite finish in wine-dark bordelaise. The flesh of the meat shades from a carnation-pink medium-rare middle to a deep, herb-scented outer crust. The near-melting fats cap shines like polished quartz. Chew for chew, it’s actually some of the lovely steaks I’ve had the pleasure to eat, and it practically earns each foolish, self-serious flourish. Ignore the climate-ravaging results of cattle ranching; ignore the plaque build up in your arteries; ignore the hundred-and-thirty-dollar price ticket (which will get you sauces, two sides, and a black-pepper-inflected popover—one thing of a deal, in contrast with the nickel-and-dime exorbitance of a meat-and-sides meal à la carte). A well-prepared steak is goddam scrumptious. Why wouldn’t you wish to wrap it in ritual and make it an avatar of social energy? Why wouldn’t you wish to return to its uncooked, unadorned, masculine simplicity whenever you really feel just like the well-established hierarchies of the world are threatened, when the doorways to American life appear too broad open, when the old style purity of “regular” is shifting in discomfiting methods?
