The New York steakhouse has never sold steak alone. It sells reassurance: flattering light, expensive wine, attentive service and the feeling that the room has been arranged to keep the outside world from interfering with dinner. Daniel Boulud’s La Tête d’Or understands the transaction very well.
The Park Avenue South restaurant, designed by David Rockwell, is grand without looking like an old club. High ceilings, blue banquettes, wood and copper give it scale and polish. Boulud named the restaurant for the park in Lyon, his hometown, but this is not a French restaurant dropped into Manhattan. It is recognizably a New York steakhouse with a French vocabulary.
The menu makes that clear. Prime rib comes with bordelaise and béarnaise, Dover sole with lemon-caper butter, and the potato choices run from fries to gratin. The French technique does not make the steakhouse austere. If anything, it makes the indulgence more organized.
I went at lunch, which turned out to be a revealing time to see the place. A luxury dining room has less evening glamour to hide behind in the middle of the day. Then something stranger happened: a film shoot in the restaurant disrupted the meal badly enough that the restaurant later apologized and refunded it.
The mishap exposed something important about a restaurant like La Tête d’Or. At this level, diners are paying for control as much as ingredients. The room, service and timing are supposed to make the city recede for a couple of hours. A film crew does the opposite. Suddenly the machinery of the place is impossible to ignore.
That does not make La Tête d’Or a failed restaurant. In an odd way, it clarified what the restaurant is trying to do. Its luxury is not radical cooking or hushed exclusivity. It is the promise of a very polished New York occasion. The day I visited, the occasion got away from them.
