The 212 column revisits New York institutions that have helped define the city, from time-honored restaurants to unsung dives.
On West 36th Street, a few blocks from the clamor of Penn Station and Madison Square Garden, a brown awning with white lettering beckons diners into Keens Steakhouse, where New York history is served up along with lavish slabs of U.S.D.A. prime beef, arguably the best in town. There’s also the famous mutton chop, big as your arm, Keens’s signature dish since 1885, when the restaurant first opened its doors.
New York was well ensconced in the Gilded Age when Albert Keen, a producer who ran the Lambs Club, a hangout for theater folk, set up his namesake restaurant (originally called Keen’s English Chop House) in the middle of Manhattan. It too was frequented by thespians, writers and composers, many of whom worked nearby. The Garrick Theatre was one block over, and I like to imagine William Gillette, a celebrated Sherlock Holmes, arriving in full deerstalker for his chop and mug of ale.
In 1885, the Statue of Liberty arrived in New York City; the first New York headquarters of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company was constructed in Lower Manhattan; and New York native Theodore Roosevelt published “Hunting Trips of a Ranchman,” a chronicle of his time in the Dakota Territory. A decade later, Roosevelt became the city’s police commissioner. The white clay churchwarden pipe he smoked at Keens is on display in the restaurant’s front hall near the maître d’s stand, along with pipes smoked by other regular patrons, including “Buffalo Bill” Cody and Babe Ruth. (The collection runs to about 90,000, many of them hanging from the ceiling of the main dining room.) Too delicate to travel, the pipes reserved for members of Keens’s Pipe Club were stored at the restaurant so that when a customer returned, his or her — Dr. Ruth Westheimer and Liza Minnelli have been honorary members — pipe was delivered to the table.
Turn right past the maître d’s stand into the convivial pub room, where the menu includes a smoked bacon sandwich with Cheddar, oysters Rockefeller or my favorite, a steak salad with slices of rare prime sirloin, butter lettuce, a few perfectly boiled potatoes and the house steak sauce. I like it best with an icy martini shaken by Manolo Morales, 46, Keens’s longtime bartender, who knows that the only true martini is made with London dry gin. “It’s by far the most popular drink at Keens,” he says, even though the bar has a dazzling array of golden single malts.
On a recent fall afternoon, Keens’s manager, Gary Bernstein, 64, who, like the keeper of a stately home, knows every inch of the territory (he started working at the restaurant in 2013), gave me a tour. On the wood-paneled walls that line the main dining room, the bar and the series of dining rooms on the second level, there are as many as 500 pieces of memorabilia — sports, New York, presidential — collected over the years by Keens’s owners, including a menu signed by the baseball legend Joe DiMaggio, a photo of members of the 1908 U.S. Olympic team, a birth chart from 1903 showing that more babies were born on the Lower East Side than on the Upper West Side, and a pair of oil paintings of a dour-looking colonial couple. The four dining rooms on the second floor each have their own character. The Lincoln Room, for example, displays a stained program that a nearby framed article claims Lincoln was holding at Ford’s Theatre on April 14, 1865, when he was shot by John Wilkes Booth.
The Bull Moose, a dining room dedicated to Teddy Roosevelt and to American presidents in general, has a stuffed moose head over the fireplace. I’ve always thought of Keens, with its masculine atmosphere, its booze and meat, as a bit of a stronghold for guys. Over the main bar downstairs is a painting of a naked lady, known as Miss Keen, lying on a couch in a perfect come-hither, fin de siècle pose. When I was growing up, my father, his cronies and one or two of his brothers (there were six) went to Keens for special occasions, though it was a time when there were good steakhouses everywhere in New York. (In Greenwich Village, where we lived, it was the Steak Joint.) Even as late as the 1970s, there were pubs in New York that didn’t admit women, among them McSorley’s Old Ale House on East Seventh Street, which was successfully sued by lawyers for the National Organization for Women. Keens was a gentlemen-only establishment too, until the early 1900s, when the English actress Lillie Langtry, in the mood for a mutton chop, was denied entry to the steakhouse. She brought Keens to court and won. She got her chop and one of the upstairs dining rooms named for her.
These days, the famous chop is more like lamb dressed as mutton. At a booth in the main dining room, the executive chef Bill Rodgers, 64, tells me that after World War II, when soldiers were served mutton as part of their rations, the dish fell out of favor. The age of the meat likely didn’t help. “Years ago, the definition of mutton was [meat from a sheep that] was 1 to 3 years of age,” says Rodgers. Now, mutton can be just over a year old, and the Keens chop is just slightly older than a lamb chop. It’s huge (26 ounces), and tasty, especially the hem of crispy, succulent fat. I ate the whole thing. Out on a culinary precipice of no return, I also tried the hash browns, sublime carrots with brown butter, a savory blue cheese soufflé and the best Key lime pie I’ve ever had.
Rodgers, who worked for the chef Thomas Keller, is like a general, overseeing more than 50 sous chefs, butchers, porters and laundry people. There are two kitchens — one behind the main dining room, the other downstairs beside the cold-aging room. He escorts me to the latter, which is practically glacial and scented by the meat piled on wire racks almost up to the ceiling: the chops, porterhouse steaks the size of small carry-ons, prime ribs that, rolled up, are bigger than basketballs.
“We do between 500 and 600 dinners a night, as many as 100 lunches a day, and an average of 10 private parties every week,” says Bonnie Jenkins, Keens’s general manager. She loves the place most of all for the stories and the scores of notable people she’s met, including Muhammad Ali. “He was so gracious. We made him an honorary Pipe [Club] member,” she says.
In 1928, the restaurateur and real estate developer Herman Zuch bought Keen’s Old English Chop House and ran it with his family until just before he died in 1971. A few years later, David Zuch, Herman’s son, put the restaurant on the market. Writing about its 1977 closure for The New York Times, Mary Breasted cites rising utilities and food costs as a few of the reasons that one of the city’s oldest restaurants, “an architectural landmark of dark‐beamed old New York,” had fallen on hard times. “David Zuch … says he can no longer afford to operate it in the manner to which its patrons are accustomed,” she writes.
Bernstein, Jenkins and Rodgers credit the next owner, the radiation oncologist George Schwarz, for bringing Keens back to life. A Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, Schwarz had already opened a handful of other popular New York restaurants, including One Fifth, Elephant and Castle and NoHo Star, when he and his wife, the artist Kiki Kogelnik, decided to buy Keens and invest $1.4 million to restore it to its present glory. Kogelnik oversaw the design. “George not only kept Keens alive, he made it what it is now,” Jenkins says.
Schwarz died in 2016 but he set up a trust, which now owns the restaurant. After 139 years, Keens is as serendipitous as the city itself, a place where devotees of the Gilded Age and Edith Wharton might meet New York Knicks fans and even the players, over a rare porterhouse. “I remember when I first came to Keens,” says Jenkins. “It was like opening a secret door to New York’s past.”
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