La Tête d’Or

This lunch was part initiation and part passing of the torch. I was in NYC on a quick trip, after launching the redesigned brunch.org two days earlier.

My old friend (but new reviewer) HGPY had pushed me for years to rebuild the website, and he proposed a steak to celebrate its completion. In my brunch retirement I hadn’t eaten a steak in several years, but was willing to try.

HGPY chose from the main menu: a 6-ounce hangar steak au poivre — rare — with an order of Béarnaise for his frites.

I went with a prix fixe option from French Restaurant Week, which had actually ended two days earlier: a Caesar salad, a 5-ounce Black Angus Filet Mignon au poivre with Broccolini and Pommes Purée, and a Pecan Joconde for dessert.

The restaurant ranged from suits to t-shirts, ties to baseball hats. A table of Sony executives, a table of summer associates. A woman in a gold dress celebrating her birthday by herself did a little dance in her seat after tasting her filet.

We didn’t dance when we tried our steaks, but we were impressed with their consistency and precision — all of the components felt refined and benchmarked. HGPY noted that “This is the place you’d come to calibrate your ‘6’ ratings” in brunch.org’s 7-point scales.

A younger me would have avoided filet mignon as too lean, but it was just the right size and texture for my steak re-introduction. A rich, peppery au poivre sauce circled the filet, a dark moat around ramparts of potato purée, under two fallen broccolini. It was well proportioned and more elegantly plated than the bare slab of HGPY’s perfectly rare hangar steak. Both steaks had a small topknot of caramelized onion, the best I’ve tasted.

I felt relieved after the meal, confident that our newest reviewer would carry the brunch.org torch to his next destination: Paris.