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After 76 years, the lights go out at Donohue’s Steak House on Friday night — and the woman who’s poured drinks there for nearly five decades has no interest in a farewell tour. No after-party, no speeches, no last-call fanfare. Just a regular night of business, owner Maureen Donohue-Peters says, and then she’ll sit down and have a couple of cocktails with her late father.
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That quiet exit caps a goodbye the Lexington Avenue institution began signaling back in March, when we covered its final St. Patrick’s Day, and again when Donohue-Peters set the closing date for June. In a sendoff this week, the New York Times reported that rather than ease into the homestretch, the 64-year-old owner has spent several nights a week this past month working the bar by herself — pouring for all 13 stools, the standing-room crowd, and the full 50-seat dining room. The busier it gets, the happier she looks.Her reasons for walking away are personal, not financial. Donohue-Peters has said her landlord even offered to lower the rent to keep her, but she’s tired of the city’s noise and wants to “look at the water” out east. She and her husband own a home in Hampton Bays, and last year she and her niece Mary Barrie opened Donohue’s East in Westhampton Beach — the family’s first new location in three-quarters of a century. Between the two restaurants, she’s been clocking 100-hour weeks.
The Manhattan room she’s leaving behind has barely changed since her father and grandfather built it in 1950: the checkerboard floor, the black vinyl booths, the blue-glass engraving of an elephant above the bar. The menu still reads like a vintage Americana time capsule — Boston scrod, Maryland turkey, the occasional broiled sirloin — and the only ways to book a table are to walk in or call the original 1950 wall phone, which still rings at the end of the bar. A brief flirtation with OpenTable, Donohue-Peters said, was “a nightmare.”
What made the place endure wasn’t the food so much as the room itself, where the postman might be drinking next to a Supreme Court justice. Over the years the bar drew Anthony Kennedy, Michael Bloomberg, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, Walter Cronkite, Gay Talese — and, infamously, Bernie Madoff — alongside regulars whose first names and drink orders the staff committed to memory without ever Googling anyone. As landlord David Berger put it, the first thing callers ask is whether Maureen will be there, “because she is the restaurant.”
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Which is why, whoever comes next, it won’t be Donohue’s. Berger said ten restaurateurs applied to take over the space and two are still in contention, but the name isn’t for sale and the rent will climb once she’s gone. Donohue-Peters will pick her successor only if she likes them, and she may sell the fixtures — or pack them all up for Long Island, including the framed photo of her father, Michael, pouring a cocktail the week the restaurant opened.Either way, Friday is the end. Donohue’s is at 845 Lexington Avenue, near East 64th Street, serving through June 19.
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