New York’s first steakhouses were dungeons. Or so they were called, with love, these basements and back rooms of the mid-1800s where men (and only men) perched on crates and ate beef and bread off barrels with sawdust at their feet and not a fork or knife in sight.
They were not proper restaurants, but provisional spaces commandeered for rough-and-ready banquets, where haves and have-nots made common cause over heart-stopping amounts of meat and ale. The cooking of the beef was straightforward: salt, pepper, fire, then a dunk in a bucket of melted butter.
No one pondered the breed of cow or grade of meat. (U.S.D.A. standards were not officially introduced until 1927.) The point was to wolf down as much as you could. “The life of the party,” the journalist Joseph Mitchell wrote in The New Yorker in 1939, was “the man who let out the most ecstatic grunts, drank the most beer, ate the most steak and got the most grease on his ears.”
Today our steakhouses come ornamented in leather and brass. The animal within us bares its teeth for fine cuts laid on the likes of Bernardaud china. We wait, docile, for the silver-domed cart to unveil a hulk of prime rib in rosy bloom. It seems to occur to no one that we are being fattened up like the cattle we feast on.
What do we ask of a modern steakhouse? Can a steakhouse even be modern? Old-schoolers insist on gloomy woods, side dishes ranging from mash to purée that no camera could ever make beautiful, and stoic servers who register your existence as but a drop of rain in a vast ocean. Throw in memories of a mob murder and you will always have customers.
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