Google Maps
A new restaurant is coming to the Lexington Avenue space where Donohue’s Steak House served martinis and broiled sirloins for 76 years, and the man behind it says he wants it to feel as close to the old place as possible. There’s a catch, though. A lot of what regulars loved about Donohue’s isn’t there anymore.
Advertisement
Golden Age Hospitality, restaurateur Jon Neidich’s company, signed a lease for the space this summer, beating out about 10 other interested parties, according to the New York Times. Neidich plans to open next spring. As expected, the restaurant won’t be called Donohue’s. Landlord David Berger said back in June, when Donohue’s closed its doors, that the name wasn’t for sale. The sidewalk awning now just reads “Steak House.”The bar, the booths, and most of the room’s other original fixtures are gone. Owner Maureen Donohue-Peters, who began her long goodbye with the restaurant’s final St. Patrick’s Day in March, offered to sell all of it to Neidich, but the two couldn’t agree on a price. Neidich told the Times she wanted $750,000. Donohue-Peters said her number was closer to $550,000 or $650,000, and that talks never really got going. So she had the polished wooden bar top, the back bar, the Formica tables, and the tufted black vinyl booths trucked out to the East End of Long Island, where she lives and runs her other restaurant, Donohue’s East. “He didn’t want it, so it went,” she told the Times.
What she left behind gives Neidich something to work with: the checkerboard floor, the wood paneling, the chalkboard where the nightly specials were written, and the Garland broiler in the kitchen. He said he intends to restore the floor and the paneling, while the chalkboard’s fate hasn’t been decided. “Aesthetically, my goal is to keep as much as possible of what it was,” he said. “It will be a lot of restoration and some preservation.”
Details that can’t be saved, he’ll try to replace. He’s already talking to a ceramist about matching the vintage green tiles in the restrooms, and he hopes to put the broiler back to use. It seared double-cut pork chops and sirloin steaks for seven decades, and Donohue-Peters said the steel rods below the flames are the same ones that were there when her father opened the restaurant in 1950. “That’s where the flavor is,” she said.
For the bar, Neidich plans to bring in woodwork salvaged from somewhere else and fit it to the space. He told the Times he hopes it’ll be “a real drinking bar,” where bartenders know regulars’ names and drink orders, the way Donohue-Peters and her staff did.
Advertisement
The menu is still taking shape. Neidich said he’s been talking with Golden Age’s chef, Marjorie Meek-Bradley, about keeping the focus on broiled meats and a few sides.Reviving old spaces has become something of a habit for Golden Age. The group runs the pool tables and jukebox at Lucy’s, the East Village dive bar, and operates Acme and Elvis, two NoHo restaurants dating back to the 1980s Cajun craze. It also recently turned the former Silver Spurs diner in Greenwich Village into Saint Denis, and was set to reopen Le Petit Journal, a 65-year-old jazz club in Paris, in early October.
Neidich admits the room won’t be the same without Donohue-Peters, who’d tended bar there for nearly five decades, but he’s hoping some of its spirit sticks around. “Not to get too woo-woo, but I believe in the energy of spaces,” he told the Times. “I don’t totally believe in cursed spaces, but I do believe in spaces that had really good runs and have an energy of all the good times that went on in them.”
Donohue’s was at 845 Lexington Avenue, near East 64th Street.
Have a news tip? Send it to us here!
