The unassuming restaurant first opened in 1950.
Photo: Robert K. Chin/Alamy
Yet another old-school New York dining icon is leaving us, and this departure is particularly wrenching. It’s Donohue’s Steak House, the railroad-car-size Upper East Side time capsule that has for decades been punching well above its weight in antique ambiance and archetypal significance. The spiritual home of Yankee pot roast and mid-century service will close in June.
There is some solace to be had in this, as owner Maureen Donohue-Peters would have it. Even if the joint’s lease hadn’t been up for renewal at the end of this year — which it is — she was ready to bring this chapter of Donohue’s to a close. “I want to leave while I still love the game,” Donohue-Peters says. “The city is not for me anymore. I want a better quality of life. To me, it’s bittersweet.”
Donohue-Peters appeared to have made up her mind earlier this year. With an Instagram post in March, she invited Donohue’s followers to “join us for our final St. Patrick’s Day. Thank you for all the great memories.” More than one of the comments on that post began with “Final???”
Yes, final. Donohue-Peters wasn’t interested in waiting out her lease; even offers from the landlord to lower the rent couldn’t dissuade her. The curtain will officially fall this summer.
The tide seemed to shift for Donohue-Peters when she and her niece and partner, Mary Barrie, opened Donohue’s East in Westhampton Beach last summer. It was the business’s first extension in 75 years. Suddenly, Donohue-Peters, who lives in Hampton Bays and grew up in the area, had a restaurant in her backyard. The new location proved an immediate success and attracted many of the same fans who loved the original. The food and atmosphere out East are replicas of those in Manhattan, though the new space has more windows.
What happens to the timeless Lexington Avenue location is not yet clear. Donohue-Peters isn’t interested in selling the name, and she plans to open another Donohue’s on Long Island with another niece, Maureen Healy. (Regarding all the Maureens in the family tree, Donohue-Peters says the Donohues “had a habit of repeating.”) But she is entertaining offers to buy the classic interior. Any buyer — potential suitors are said to include the Frenchette Group, which famously revived Le Veau d’Or — will have to adopt the milieu as a whole, however. Otherwise, Donohue-Peters will take every last oil painting and metal coatrack with her, leaving only the bare walls and the landmarked façade. “I’m not going to sell the space inside if I’m not comfortable with the person,” she explains. “It’s not about the money. That’s a unique, coddled space.”
Donohue’s was founded by Martin Donohue in 1950. He and his son Michael built the decorative wooden backbar that greets guests as they enter. Martin eventually handed it down to Michael, who’d started working at the restaurant as a teenager and died in 2000. Then came Michael’s daughter Maureen. The generational family dynamic is reflected in their real estate. The Donohues have never owned the four-story building they inhabit at 845 Lexington Avenue, but for all 76 years in business they have dealt with the same landlord family.
Michael Donohue, father of current owner Maureen Donohue-Peters, working at the bar when it opened in 1950.
Photo: Courtesy of Maureen Donohue
“Donohue’s dark-paneled dining room and its comfortable booths provide an intimate and old-fashioned atmosphere that permits its customers to converse in a relatively quiet atmosphere,” says Gay Talese, one longtime fan. “I can’t remember during my decades of faithful attendance ever regretting patronizing the place.”
Somewhat surprisingly, almost all the press about Donohue’s has been written in the past 15 years, but the restaurant did draw its fair share of boldface names over the decades. In its earlier days, they were mainly politicians, financiers, and journalists, people who were famous because of the power they wielded. (Donohue’s is on the Upper East Side, after all.) David Rockefeller came in, as did Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, Police Commissioner Bill Bratton, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, future felon Bernie Madoff, advertising exec Jerry Della Femina, gossip columnist Liz Smith, television journalists Morley Safer and Peter Jennings, and “all of Channel 5.” There were also a smattering of artistic types, including Talese, historian Teddy White, Kitty Carlisle Hart, Liza Minnelli, and architect Robert A.M. Stern.
Celebrities to stop in more recently include Drew Barrymore and Robert Redford. They were perhaps alerted to the restaurant’s existence when it was used as a perfectly New York–y backdrop for shows like The Undoing, starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant, and Billions. Or perhaps it was difficult for them to ignore a 2015 story about Donohue’s regular Robert Ellsworth, a multimillionaire art collector who bequeathed a $100,000 tip to Maureen and her niece Mary Barrie.
What drew everyone in? The visual spell cast by Donohue’s can’t be underestimated, even if you’re approaching it from the sidewalk as a stranger to the place. The façade is shiny black; the sign above is dark red; the awning is green. The small picture window reads “Donohue’s” in gold-leaf script and, below it, “Dining Room in Rear.” This glass box is often decked out in homey decorations for the holidays.
Inside, the exterior color scheme is echoed. There’s more black in the form of the gleaming vinyl booths and the black-and-white checkerboard floor, red in the shape of the bright tablecloths, and green in the paper place mats that tell you Donohue’s is open for “Lunch * Dinner * Supper” — making it perhaps the only restaurant left in New York that offers “supper” by name. (“Back then, supper was after 9 p.m., for the theater crowd after the shows got out,” explains Donohue-Peters.) Whatever the meal, the menu has long featured greatest-hits comfort food from the Eisenhower years: shepherd’s pie, Maryland turkey, French onion soup, center-cut pork chops, London broil, chicken potpie, fish and chips, meat loaf. These specials are written on a chalkboard hung on the back wall.
As appealing as Donohue’s décor and home cooking may be, they don’t explain the restaurant’s magnetic pull on New Yorkers of a certain temperament. Its departure from the scene isn’t about losing a style of cuisine so much as an irreplaceable reverberation of a lost dining ideal. It’s a vibe that’s free of front-of-house obstructionism, where you can eat at the bar but you don’t have to eat at the bar; you can just drink. It’s a vibe where the bartenders wear white collared shirts and black ties, and the servers wear white shirts and black pants, and none does so ironically. It’s a vibe where your martini or Manhattan is basically a double with the remainder of the cocktail served in a pint-glass sidecar complete with julep strainer. It’s a vibe where that cocktail is served by a career bartender who’s slinging drinks because it’s a good steady job, not because cocktails got cool 25 years ago.
“It’s an institution,” says Catherine Treboux, who inherited Le Veau d’Or from her own father, Robert. “It takes years to establish one and generations in the ownership and clientele. Heart, soul, comfort, and consistency — and father-daughter relationships create the best institutions.”
Donohue-Peters in 2014.
Photo: Jewel Samad/AFP via Getty Images
