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After weeks of speculation sparked by a cryptic social media post, one of the Upper East Side’s longest-running restaurants now has an end date on the calendar — and it’s sooner than many regulars had hoped.
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Donohue’s Steak House, the railroad-narrow time capsule at 845 Lexington Avenue near East 64th Street, will shutter this June, owner Maureen Donohue-Peters told Grub Street. The Manhattan original, which has operated continuously since 1950, will close even though the landlord offered to lower the rent to keep the third-generation operator from walking away.Donohue-Peters told Grub Street that she wants to step away while she still loves the work, and that the city no longer suits her. She and her niece Mary Barrie opened a second location, Donohue’s East, in Westhampton Beach last summer — the family business’s first expansion in three-quarters of a century — and that outpost has quickly drawn many of the same loyalists who packed the Lexington Avenue dining room. A third Donohue’s, planned with another niece, Maureen Healy, is in the works elsewhere on Long Island.
The fate of the Manhattan space itself is unresolved. Donohue-Peters is reportedly weighing offers for the interior — the dark wood backbar built by her father and grandfather, the black vinyl booths, the checkerboard floor, the oil paintings, the metal coatracks — but only from a buyer she trusts to keep the room intact. The Frenchette Group, which restored Le Veau d’Or, is among the parties said to be interested. If no suitable buyer emerges, she plans to take every fixture with her, leaving behind only bare walls and the landmarked façade.
The restaurant was founded by Martin Donohue in 1950 and passed to his son Michael, who began working there as a teenager and ran it until his death in 2000. Maureen, Michael’s daughter, has helmed it since. The Donohues have never owned the four-story building they occupy, but they have shared it with the same landlord family for the entire 76-year run.
Over the decades, Donohue’s drew a clientele that ranged from neighborhood regulars to David Rockefeller, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, Liza Minnelli, Morley Safer, Drew Barrymore, and Robert Redford. The dining room has appeared on screen in HBO’s The Undoing and Showtime’s Billions. Its paper placemats still advertise “Lunch * Dinner * Supper,” a holdover from the era when the post-theater crowd filed in after 9 p.m.
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The closing was first hinted at in March, when the restaurant’s Instagram account invited followers to “join us for our final St. Patrick’s Day.” Several commenters responded with a single word, repeated in disbelief: “Final???”Now they have their answer.
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