New York's 24 Best Steaks and Chops, Reviewed
Crane Club’s parmesan-aged strip, Bar Oliver’s $36 skirt steak, the crispy duck at Bridges, and more. Also, a few words on Tete D'Or's olive-fed wagyu, and the promise of dairy cow meat
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Dear Friends,
I’m stoked to present our second edition of The Steak List! Scroll past the paywall for meat-centric reviews of Bridges, Bar Oliver, Crane Club, and Tete D’Or, alongside notes on other steaks and chops. Like The Lo 57, this is a long column designed for skimming and scrolling. This is a comprehensive guide to eating red meat in the city, with intel on all the wagyu supplements out there, and advice on what steaks to skip.
But first...
The State of Steak in 2024: The Power Play
There’s been a lot of talk about sushi spots edging out steakhouses as centers of power dining. I’ve written some of those “bromakase” columns myself. But bastions of beef aren’t giving up. New steakhouses are adapting, finding ways to serve better meat, better sides, and way too much wagyu — all at absolutely stupid prices. They’re luring hordes of moneyed diners into rooms that recall the big-box spots of the gilded aughts. Big restaurants for big steaks. Some things never change.
Here’s the vibe.
It ain’t cheap
Be prepared to spend $100 or more on your steak. Droughts out West have shrunk the usable land that cows can forage on, limiting their production and pushing up prices — a whopping 38 percent since before the pandemic.
So in New York, you’re seeing more steaks “for one” in the $65 to $90 range, which means they clock in at $100 or more after a side, tax, and tip. That stratospheric price level holds true at roughly nine or ten of the city’s most high-profile steakhouses. And the USDA expects cattle prices to rise again next year.
Blowout Euro steakhouses are trending
People don’t visit old school steakhouses for bone marrow foam or squid ink rice. They go for steaks that weigh more than law school textbooks. They go for martinis of lethal potency. They go for resistance to change. But here’s the thing: in an era when almost every porterhouse commands fine dining prices, you can’t blame patrons for wanting their beef — and everything else — to show a bit more polish.
Upscale brasseries have provided some of that polish for quite some time now, but a growing crop of steakhouses are taking a page from The Grill and moving deeper into the realm of splurge dining.
Take the new Crane Club in the old Del Posto digs. It sells caviar arancini, caviar pastries, two types of caviar service, and Champagne that starts at $35 by the glass — a wine that costs more than some good steaks! Then, there’s Bourbon Steak at The Essex House, hawking A5 beef tartare for $55 — an exorbitant appetizer — and wagyu cuts that command higher prices than some tasting menus.
And finally, we have Daniel Boulud’s La Tete D’Or. There, you’ll find caviar pasta, vertiginous shellfish platters, wagyu everything, truffled potatoes, truffle butter, patrons who look unbothered by the “f&ck it” pricing, and waiters fluent in the language of French sauces — including perigourdine, which is packed with…truffles! Like Crane Club, it’s set in the type of sleek, sprawling room where you’d expect John Wick to start killing off bad guys with good cutlery while rich folks keep eating their lobster bisque.
A porterhouse for two will cost you over $300 at Tete D’Or or Crane Club.
Fancy Korean steakhouses are about to blow up
In 2017, Simon Kim opened Cote, a venue that combined the tabletop grilling of a Korean barbecue spot with the dry-aged sensibilities of an American steakhouse. It’s a rare Michelin-starred restaurant that feels like a nightclub. And it’s still one of the hottest tickets in town. But it’s no longer alone.
The team behind Mari is building their own fancy Korean steakhouse, the 10,000 square-foot Gui. The Cote team will soon debut a sequel in Midtown East. And at Bōm in Flatiron, the Oiji Mi crew quietly serves some of the city’s most expensive tastings of steak. It’s where I watched two guys peer pressure a companion in a suit to polish off an A5 supplement ($85). He was stuffed. But there was no mercy in this room. “Dude you gotta finish that.”
My estimation is that Sushi Bros are still really Steak Bros at heart. And I suppose this is a good time to remind everyone that meat isn’t the only area in which New York is becoming more red. But that’s a different conversation.
New York’s 24 Best Steaks & Chops
We don’t do a best steakhouses list, because many of the top steaks are found in brasseries, Latin spots, and elsewhere. This is a broader guide to eating beef in NYC.
The parmesan-aged strip steak at The Crane Club
In the dark bar room at Crane Club, bartenders shake banana rum cocktails. A group of dapper dudes in suits converse in both English and Russian. One of them asks for a “double” of a nice clear spirit. He’s wearing a brown Tourbillon timepiece — don’t dare call it a watch — whose price I’d estimate at $600,000 or more.
I’m having a more low key evening with a $78 strip.