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What’s French for ‘Steakhouse’?
Video: Hugo Yu
Walk west on 24th Street at twilight, as I recently did, and it’s hard not to notice the glow d’or. Emanating from the recently completed One Madison, a refurbished office tower home to IBM and the global investment firm Franklin Templeton, the warm, rose-golden light is luxury in lumens: a flame for high-spend moths.
They have lately fluttered, from upstairs and outside, to La Tête d’Or, an expansive steakhouse from Daniel Boulud, one of our great restaurateurs of excess, whose imperial reach — he has more than a dozen restaurants and cafés in New York and another half-dozen around the world — hasn’t slowed him from hitting on dining trends as they happen. During the gastropub era, he opened DBGB on the Bowery. His DB Bistro Moderne helped inaugurate the concept of a luxury burger a decade and a half before Minetta Tavern. In our current members’-club moment, he opened Centurion New York, a hot spot for AmEx card holders. Officially, according to the chef’s website, the new La Tête d’Or “bridges Daniel’s two worlds: New York and France.” (Parc de la Tête d’Or, the elegant, English-style garden in Boulud’s native Lyon, is a rough French equivalent to Central Park and was completed in the same year.) Unofficially, it seems designed to fill a gap in the Bouludian business portfolio. Ours is a sirloin metropolis and has been since the Tammany Hall era’s beefsteak banquets. Can you even call yourself a New York megarestaurateur without a steakhouse?
La Tête d’Or is a meeting of American burl, a steakhouse’s raison d’être, and French finesse. If the French chef offers commandments, the American restaurant offers choices: It’s easy to find steaks at Boulud’s many other establishments, but only here do they come in 12 different variations. When you factor in the seven (French) sauces, four compound butters, three surf and four turf add-ons, the possibilities here are close to limitless. Your heart will give out before your options do.
This spirit of Franco-American collaboration spreads across the menu in both directions. (Boulud is the guiding presence; two of his deputies, Mitchell Lienhard and Andreas Seidel, are running the kitchen.) A steakhouse-classic wedge salad is old-fashioned iceberg and blue-cheese dressing that’s improved with gamy ribbons of smoked tongue; a seafood “salad Louie” trades the usual shrimp for prawns, lobster, crab, and cuttlefish while keeping what looks for all the world like bottled French dressing. A bistro hunk of bone marrow comes topped with New York deli in the form of pastrami and sauerkraut, the fatty marrow like a jellied glob of French onion soup. Sometimes these adulterations are unmistakable, sometimes not. “Very good chicken nugget,” my father said at a one dinner, swiping a golden-fried little round of sweetbreads through a saucer of gribiche — or, as he would call it, egg salad.
For all the accoutrements, a steakhouse lives and dies by its beef. La Tête d’Or has one excellent cut: a $130, ten-ounce slab of prime rib, served with all due pomp and circumstance. Out wheels a trolley — the Carbone-ified Grill pioneered this move in the modern era, and it still plays — atop which sits a squat round of rib, crusty and mottled like something pulled from a buried reliquary. A server will carve off a respectable slice, glossily pink nearly to the rim, with a generous padding of fat. Almost unbearably tender after eight hours of slow roasting, it’s the one steak on the menu that isn’t grilled over oak, and it needs little more than the accompanying shower of horseradish, though it comes with Bordelaise, béarnaise, creamed spinach, pommes purées, and one giant popover. These are the right supporting players. For all the many options, which include tomato-spiked sauce choron and truffled Périgourdine, I never found a sauce that I preferred to the marrow-rich, winey Bordelaise or a vegetable I preferred to the creamed spinach.
None of the other steaks I sampled on the menu reached the heights of the prime rib. None were bad, however, and if the rib trolley were in the shop for some reason, I could as contentedly take the cheapest cut on the menu — a tenderloin steak-frites — as the more expensive option. A 34-ounce côte de boeuf had a winning, charry chew but was, like a few other dishes I tried, puckeringly oversalted. Among the non-beef options, I enjoyed a sage-scented veal chop, though it was not improved by a suggested $48 addition of “oxtail Madison,” a turf supplement of braised oxtail, truffle sauce, and an entire suffocating lobe of foie gras.
Of course, part of the golden allure of any high-end steakhouse is ordering to impress. In that spirit, you always add the add-on, and the tranches of citrus-fed Australian Wagyu and olive-fed American Wagyu are worth their weight in gold. (They may be literally, since at least the latter is tagged with status dining’s most fearsome cipher: “MP.”) The wine list offers seven full pages of Bordeaux — all the likely suspects, from Mouton Rothschild, Pétrus, and Cheval Blanc to Boulud’s own Cuvée Daniel from Château Haut Selve in Graves — and Napa heavies like Corison and Opus One in vintages dating back to the 1990s and early aughts.
Cast an eye around the gracious David Rockwell–designed dining room and you’ll notice the fleece vests and uncomfortable dates of the money-managerial class. I may not ever recover from seeing a prime example of the latter on one visit: two tins of caviar, two pots of tea, and complete silence. TikTok’s brassiest restaurant reviewers, the VIP List, cited “the amount of daddies in the room” as one of the restaurant’s defining features. The restaurant leans in with a wink. I sampled, aspirationally, a gin-and-Champagne cocktail called the Gold Digger. “Don’t worry,” one of our many servers said after the requisite allergy check. “I’m sure there’s a doctor in here.”
La Tête d’Or
A Bad Bloom
Skip the Vidalia-onion side, a hoity-toity Bloomin’ Onion that wasn’t bloomin’ enough: fried bits surrounding a wet pile of caramelized onion.
Open Season
Maybe owing to its size, La Tête d’Or’s reservations are easy enough to secure. Tables were generally available at reasonable times — imagine that.
Bar Bites
The handsome front bar is reserved for walk-ins. It serves only small snacks, though that does include a portion of sweetbread nuggets.
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