Fresh Meat

British import Hawksmoor is a steakhouse where you can order the fish.

- By Adam Platt

AS COVID TAKES its time ebbing away from the life of the city, all sorts of welcome signs of recovery are springing up around town. Broadway is open again, of course, and the last time I wandered down Restaurant Row on 46th Street, herds of goggle-eyed tourists were jostling for space along the sidewalks just like in the old days. The lean-to sheds up and down the avenues are made of sturdier materials for the coming cold weather, and many are set with proper four-tops and strings of decorative lights. A few vanished establishments are even coming back to life (hello, Gotham), and here and there the kind of theatrical, big-money, high-concept restaurants that used to open weekly, like Broadway plays, during the boom years seem to be slowly returning to the landscape.

The long-awaited New York outlet of the U.K. steakhouse franchise Hawksmoor is one of these places, and though your humble critic is as skeptical of the ridiculous phrase U.K. steakhouse as any red-blooded New Yorker, I couldn’t help feeling a little lift in the heart as I took my seat in the large room and waited for the performance to begin. The large space at the bottom of Park Avenue South has been appointed with all the familiar props: wood-paneled walls, tastefully reinforced chairs, chalkboards scrawled with daily cuts of beef, which are sold here by the ounce. The wait staff aren’t dressed in the standard steakhouse costume (waist apron, buttoned-up shirt, etc.), but on the evenings I dropped in, the tables were filled with the usual suspects: a few Englishmen who knew the brand along with portly expense-account folk eyeing their usual porterhouse order and admiring their recently decanted bottles of marked-up red wine.