Tables for Two Tango: Hannah Goldfield's "Peter Luger Steak House" and Helen Rosner's "La Tête d’Or"

Photo by Gabriel Zimmer, from Hannah Goldfield's "Peter Luger Steak House")

For my fifth post in this series, I want to compare two “Tables for Two” pieces – one by Goldfield, one by Rosner – on the same subject – the steak house.

Goldfield, in her “Peter Luger Steak House” (March 29, 2021), says she heard from a friend that Brooklyn’s venerable Peter Luger Steak House was delivering takeout. She writes,

Until a few weeks ago, Peter Luger, which was founded in 1887, was just about the last New York restaurant I would have associated with takeout. I had loved it, once, but before the pandemic I hadn’t been in years. A family tradition of steak-fuelled birthday celebrations had fizzled out. On my last visit, in 2015, I’d sat in the overflow space upstairs, where wall-to-wall carpeting and generic banquet chairs were a sad substitute for the well-worn wooden floors and furniture that give the main dining areas the charming feel of a German beer hall. Luger’s atmosphere had always been at least half of the appeal; without it, the steep prices were hard to justify.

Goldfield decides to try it. She says, “My expectations for delivery were measured. Then they were exceeded.” She describes her experience:

Opening a plastic-and-aluminum deli container to find the iconic wedge salad was like seeing an old friend: the refreshing crunch of tightly coiled ruffles of iceberg, the surprisingly juicy chopped tomato, the chunky blue-cheese dressing, the unmistakable, thick-cut, heart-clogging bacon. I was similarly exhilarated by the creamed spinach, the fried potatoes, and the chocolate mousse, with its enormous dollop of schlag (suspiciously if delightfully reminiscent of Cool Whip).

It wasn’t so much that any of the dishes stood out on their own—although I did note, as ever, how easily a knife slid through rosy slices of the dry-aged porterhouse—as it was that they shouted “steak house” loud and clear, making for a combination that I would never replicate on my own and that brings me the coziest pleasure. One of my favorite parts of my earliest Peter Luger visits was when an inevitably brusque yet joke-cracking veteran waiter would toss a handful of gold chocolate coins on the table with the check. In a paper bag of condiments, I found my beloved foil-wrapped disks.

That detail about the gold chocolate coins is marvelous. I’ve never forgotten it.

The takeout meal inspires Goldfield to go to Peter Luger and have a meal there. She writes,

The other day, I ventured back to headquarters. To mark the return to limited-capacity dining, Peter Luger announced a corny gimmick: celebrity wax figures, on loan from Madame Tussauds, would be seated between tables of warm-blooded customers. My lunch reservation was for a booth outside, but, freshly vaccinated and double masked, I could steal a peek at Audrey Hepburn.

At my table, in the shadow of the historic Williamsburgh Savings Bank building, I ordered another wedge salad (rapture, again) and a burger, a beautiful mass of luscious ground beef whose iodine tang played perfectly off a sweet, salty slice of American cheese, a fat cross-section of raw white onion, and a big, domed sesame bun. Inside the restaurant, there were no wax figures to be found; they’d gone back to Times Square after just five days. The dining room looked the same as ever, if subdued.

That “beautiful mass of luscious ground beef whose iodine tang played perfectly off a sweet, salty slice of American cheese, a fat cross-section of raw white onion, and a big, domed sesame bun” is ravishing! 

The piece ends charmingly with a Holy Cow sundae and some savvy advice from a waiter:

Before dessert—a Holy Cow sundae, with vanilla ice cream, hot fudge, and walnuts, plus schlag and a cherry on top—I asked for a burger to go, a spirit lifter for my husband, hard at work at his desk. “How do you want it cooked?” my slightly surly server asked. I hesitated. Medium? Medium rare? No, medium. “Get it medium rare and it will be medium by the time you get it home,” he said, with a twinkle in his eye.

Now turn to Helen Rosner’s “Tables for Two” review of La Tête d’Or (March 31, 2025), a Manhattan steak house owned and operated by the famed French chef Daniel Boulud.

Photo by Amy Lombard, from Helen Rosner's "Tables for Two: La Tête d'Or") 

Rosner begins by describing the restaurant itself:

Housed on the lobby level of a Flatiron office tower, La Tête is Boulud’s farthest-downtown restaurant, though there’s little downtown about the restaurant itself: it is vast, formal, and luxurious, très Boulud, from the plush, hotel-like reception area to the plush, burgundy-swathed lounge to the plush, sweeping dining room decorated in brown marble and blue velvet. The ceilings soar, the art is large and muted and gently abstract, the white linens on the tables glow like cream in the halo of Art Deco sconces and dramatically tubular chandeliers.

She likens the dining room to a stage:

A proscenium-size cutout in one wall reveals a dreamy tableau of a steak-house kitchen: butcher block and white tile, countertops artfully arranged with carnelian hunks of meat. It’s mostly for show: the real action of the real kitchen is hidden behind the rear wall of the diorama, though movement is visible, occasionally, around the edges of the backdrop, and white-jacketed cooks occasionally step into the show kitchen, plating and finishing this or that with the stoic composure of actors playing out a silent scene. A horizontal line of mirrors mounted periscopically across the top of the aperture allows diners to gaze at the workstations without any need to leave their very comfortable seats. Besides, much of the action comes to you: several of the restaurant’s dishes are prepared or plated tableside, on wheeled carts that servers glide showily around the dining room, dispensing Caesar salad and Dover sole in intimate command performances.

Rosner refers to the restaurant’s starter dishes as “foreplay.” “The meat is the thrust of the thing,” she says. The star of the menu is the prime rib. Rosner writes,

As the various table-service trolleys zigzag through the dining room, few diners look up from their conversations (or their phones). Not so when the wagon carting the “primal” of beef, from which each slab is sliced, comes around. Boulud takes his prime rib extremely seriously: only one primal is cooked at a time, a long, slow process that demands exacting attention; on one of my visits, a server sorrowfully conveyed the news that the most recent cut hadn’t been up to chef’s standards, and so none would be available for at least two more hours. Once carved and plated, each slice is draped on one end in a yellow veil of béarnaise from a copper pot, and on the other end in wine-dark bordelaise. The flesh of the meat shades from a carnation-pink medium-rare center to a deep, herb-scented outer crust. The near-melting fat cap shines like polished quartz. Bite for bite, it is truly one of the most beautiful steaks I’ve had the pleasure to consume, and it nearly earns every silly, self-serious flourish. Ignore the climate-ravaging effects of cattle ranching; ignore the plaque building up in your arteries; ignore the hundred-and-thirty-dollar price tag (which gets you sauces, two sides, and a black-pepper-inflected popover—something of a deal, compared with the nickel-and-dime exorbitance of a meat-and-sides meal à la carte). A well-prepared steak is goddam delicious.

That last line makes me smile every time I read it. 

Like Goldfield, in her Peter Luger review, Rosner ends her meal with an ice-cream sundae:

It is a strict rule of the steak house that dessert should be both childlike and wondrous, a reprieve after all the posturing and peacocking that came before. A menu might offer chocolate cake, apple strudel, a slice of cheesecake, a sticky slab of bread pudding, or, as at La Tête d’Or, a selection of oven-warm cookies. But just as essential to the steak house experience as the steak itself is the sundae—complex, frilly, multicolored, slightly absurd, an indulgence earned through innocence rather than through brute force. La Tête d’Or’s features soft-serve, your choice of swirled-together chocolate and coffee or swirled-together vanilla and a seasonal fruit flavor, their alternating stripes spiralling upward like a circus tent. It’s served in a metal coupe surrounded by a roulette of toppings in little bowls: tiny marshmallows, dehydrated berries, little bits of brownie, house-made rainbow sprinkles. The ice cream is, of course, magnificent, the chocolate sauce luscious, the bits of brownie divine. But something about this version was off, unsteady, a little wrong. There was no whipped cream—is it still a sundae without it? And there was no cherry on top.

Such a simple thing, the sundae, yet so crucial to the steak house experience. Peter Luger gets it right. La Tête d’Or doesn’t.