Orders waiting to be picked up in the kitchen at Donohue’s.
Photo: Marcus Nilsson
After 76 years on Lexington Avenue, Donohue’s will say good-bye tonight. The tributes that have poured in since owner Maureen Donohue-Peters announced, earlier this spring, her plans to close the restaurant have made clear that New York is losing a quietly legendary place whose regulars always understood exactly what they had. We, like many others, at least understood we needed to share one more round of martinis in that room. Marcus said he’d bring his camera.
The three of us first stopped into Donohue’s a couple years ago, at the beginning of a cross-country journey to document America’s steakhouses in all their guises. It was Donohue’s, in fact, that inspired the project’s title: While admiring the Gothic blackletter and sweeping cursive on the oxblood sign out front, we were reminded that steak house was historically two words.
During that visit, Christmas was around the corner. We met bartender Johnny Kelly and took his portrait. “I like making people feel welcome even if they’ve never been here before, like an Irish public house,” he told us that night. “Do I get tired of it? Between us, after 40 years in bars, I can see Florida and the sunset. But it’s been good fun.” We still got the sense that he wasn’t going to retire until the circumstances made the decision for him.
This time, when we stopped in, it was Johnny’s final Saturday shift ever. We approached him with a copy of the book, already open to the spread with his portrait to refresh his memory. It had been a long time, but the precaution proved unnecessary. “My friends,” he said, before letting us know he’d be right back after tending to a few customers at the bar.
It was four o’clock in the afternoon on the day the Knicks would go on to win game five. The bar was already full, but the “dining room in rear,” as the space continues to be advertised in the window, was empty save for a woman sitting on one of the black-leather banquettes alone. There was a nearly finished Bloody Mary and two coffee cups by her side. She paused from working on her laptop to apply some lipstick.
We ordered our drinks, a wedge, and the famous burger. The tables around us began to fill with regulars. Kathleen Hale had perched at the bar since we arrived. She was quick to share two details: her late husband John Lawrence was the first and only journalist to be jailed during Watergate, and the couple ate dinner here until practically the day he died. “John called it our kitchen,” she said. “I remember crying with Maureen at the end of the Donohue’s meal we knew would be his last.”
Meanwhile, Marcus had already been invited into the kitchen by our server, Jake Robbins. The cooks seemed eager to show him around. It filled us with a particular flavor of elation — the exact feeling that had compelled us to continue adding stops to our steak tour, even though we knew our publisher would never grant us the extra pages we kept begging for.
Several restaurant groups have been vying to take over the space. Whoever moves in will have to use a new name: It won’t be called Donohue’s. Ever since Donohue-Peters announced the impending closure, one of us — Gabe — has been stopping in. He’s not alone: A day before closing, there was a 30-minute wait for a solo bar spot at lunch.
Jake Robbins, a server, joined the team in 2021 after graduating from Tisch with an acting B.F.A.: “They took a chance on the kid and it was tough at first, but I slowly earned my place. I’m going to miss walking out the door at the end of a jammed Saturday night. I’ll miss seeing the seasons change from this view. Life happens here.”
The sensation of walking into a cool, dark steak house in the middle of a hot day is surpassed only by the crunch of a fresh wedge washed down with a martini that comes accompanied by a pint-glass sidecar. Eric regards this one-two punch as a great achievement of American culture.
“We’re gonna have to find someplace else, but we don’t know if we’re ever going to find it,” says Carol Ackerman, whose husband Herbert recently celebrated his 97th birthday. Later on, as she made her way out the door, Ackerman confirmed it was their farewell meal. “Whatever comes next, I hope they at least try to keep what was here going.”
Donohue-Peters says that a family crest has adorned the walls of all of their restaurants. At one point, there were five businesses between her, her father, and her siblings. Among other virtues, the coat of arms is said to reflect sincerity, loyalty, and survival.
Everybody gets the burger, a big, sultry thing by midcentury standards that’s almost subdued by today’s. It’s cooked in the broiler of a vintage oven, not the flat-top. The blend is lean. “Double-ground chopped prime meat, that’s it,” says Donohue-Peters.
Self-described “jack-of-all-trades” Julio Santes, porter Mardoqueo Torres, and chef Elvis Jaquez. Santes’s father worked at the restaurant for ten years; his son has been at it for 14. “We’re dedicated because Maureen is magnificent to work for,” Jaquez says.
Eric’s old pal Sandy Heyaime was in town from Florida and stopped by. “It feels classy but humble in that very New York way,” she says.
As a young man, Donegal-born Johnny Kelly gave computer programming for the IRS a shot. When offered the opportunity to take a sabbatical in New York, he grabbed it, and never went back. “You walk in the door and what you see is what you get,” he says of the restaurant where he has spent the better part of the last 15 years. “Everybody is treated the same here.”
“Never once did I even consider using anything but a calculator and a pen, no matter how busy we got,” says Donohue-Peters. “If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it, which wound up working just fine.”
“When I drop that last check, it’s going to break my heart, because at that point I’ve said good-bye to my father,” says Donohue-Peters. “Every day when I walked in and every night before leaving, I toasted to him, and now that I won’t have that bar, I won’t have him.”
Photographs Marcus Nilsson
