The restaurant opens this Friday inside One Fifth.
Photo: Alex Stanilof
When Golden Steer, the august Las Vegas steakhouse, opens its doors at One Fifth Avenue this Friday, it will represent the biggest gamble in the history of the 68-year-old restaurant. In Las Vegas, Golden Steer is an institution. Most booths are named for the famous souls who sat there. It’s where Frank Sinatra (booth No. 22), Dean Martin (No. 21), Sammy Davis Jr. (No. 20), and the rest of the Rat Pack relaxed. It’s where Elvis Presley rested his swiveling hips (booth No. 26). Later it was, famously, a mob hangout where Chicago mafioso Tony “the Ant” Spilotro huddled over martinis with his lawyer (and future Vegas mayor) Oscar Goodman (booth No. 11). But new steakhouses aren’t exactly rare arrivals in New York. Golden Steer has been built to create its own sense of history.
There isn’t much that’s subtle about Golden Steer; neither the steakhouse genre nor Vegas are known for their understatement. It is glitzy with a slightly kitsch Old West theme. Among the city’s thousands of other restaurants, that already makes it unique, even to diners who don’t know that the Vegas original opened in 1958. Today, Golden Steer is run by Amanda Signorelli (the daughter of Las Vegas developer Dr. Michael Signorelli) and her husband, entrepreneur Nick McMillan.
Walking into the dining room, diners pass a western scene wrought in scarlet-and-ruby-stained glass, a pair of silver spurs from the 1800s mounted in an alcove and a larger-than-life Doc Holliday slot machine. The main dining room is accessed through a long narrow room called “the Strip,” one of the many homages to Las Vegas. Above the booths along the walls of the Strip, mounted on striped wooden paneling, are paintings of steeds galloping, cowboys mid-whoop, lasso cocked.
The menu leans into steakhouse classicism.
Photo: Alex Staniloff
In the dining room, frontier chic gives way to urbane glitz. The room is arch steakhouse: red-leather booths, scarlet napkins fan-folded on white tablecloths, velvet chairs, a black-and-red carpet designed to match historical photos of the original restaurant. But Sinatra’s famous proto-selfie is hanging on one wall and a portrait of William Burroughs by Robert Mapplethorpe hangs on another. Mapplethorpe, of course, was a frequent guest at this address’s first famous restaurant, One Fifth, where the photographer and Patti Smith were regulars and Keith McNally got his start. (Mapplethorpe also shot the cover of Smith’s Horses on the 27th floor of the building, in the apartment of the art collector Sam Wagstaff.) Beyond a set of stained-glass doors are the two private dining rooms. The Showgirl Room, features an original sequined headdress from the Nevada State Museum. The other, the Mob Room, displays a vintage flamingo figurine plus framed photographs of Spilotro, Goodman, Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal, and his wife. When asked how the restaurant can avoid romanticizing violent crimes (Spilotro is alleged to have been involved in more than 20 murders), McMillan pauses for a second. “That’s an excellent question,” he says.
Signorelli knows that it’s a lot. “We talk often about how the brand almost doesn’t quite fit,” Signorelli explains, “because you’ve got cowboys, you’ve got mobsters, and you’ve got entertainers and you’ve got these people. Golden Steer has just been everybody else’s story and we’ve let it absorb that.” There are archaeological layers of Hollywood, pre-“Vegas” Vegas and Hollywood-in-Vegas. There are robbers and barons, actors and cowboys and singers. Thanks to the original restaurant’s role in Casino (both Nicholas Pileggi’s true-crime best seller and the Scorsese movie it inspired), there’s a rub of Hollywood glamour, as well. The place is also set in the nebulous past: “We wanted this to feel like it was always here,” explains McMillan. The couple are both originalists and fabulists, so dedicated to creating a sense of “the past” that they insisted on mounted speakers since they wouldn’t have been built into the design in the 1970s.
The menu from executive chef Brendan Scott is both straightforward and decadent. Some offerings are Golden Steer classics, like a 16-inch section of marrow bone, bloody bull-oyster shooters with homemade veal au jus, a table-side Caesar, a 24-ounce bone-in wet-aged rib eye, and a 12-ounce filet described, on the menu, as “the aristocrat of tenderness.” There are a few concessions to New York, as well. “There’s where the chef came up with steer sausage with lentils on the side, which is just fun,” says McMillan.
The reference points are varied, but they point back toward the original’s nearly 70 years of history. In New York, that history will need to be built. It took nearly 20 years for the first booths to be named at the original Golden Steer. As of now, there are no named booths at One Fifth, but Signorelli is confident that will change. “Hopefully there will be,” she says. “That’s absolutely the goal.”
Another look at the new dining room.
Photo: Alex Staniloff
This post has been updated to correct Dr. Michael Signorelli’s name.
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