Weather 
The Eighty Six on Bedford Street is the city’s hardest-to-penetrate new restaurant. I expected to hate everything about it. Instead, I had one of my best meals of the year. I’ve never been so happy to be wrong.
The ten-table steakhouse is a pygmy amidst the city’s mammoth-size beef barns. But it packs a punch way above its weight class — that is, if you’re able to get in.
Too exclusive for almost everyone but friends of the house, the Eighty Six ironically occupies the space that was once among the city’s most welcoming-to-all places — Chumley’s pub, which was at the location for nearly 75 years. An Eighty Six spokesman told me, “Limited reservations are available exclusively on DoorDash” — an outfit I associate with 1 a.m. dumpling deliveries — but really, it seems, you have to know someone.
The preciousness reduces normally sane, mature diners to mewling sycophants. In recent weeks, “Can you take me, please,” has become a common refrain among friends who think I possess a magic wand of entry.
Sadly, I do not, and I had to rely on a friend’s invite to get in myself.
Once inside, I was rewarded with a meal I’ll remember for a long time — a decadent, protein-heaven fantasia that made my yearn for more of the menu.
The Eighty Six isn’t for those who want “sauce on the side. Chef Michael Vignola uses truffle butter, bearnaise, au poivre and more like them to make magic out of obscure but extraordinary cuts from remote farms and ranches. (You won’t find any meat from the popular Snake River Farms, common to many trendy menus, here. When asked why, Vignola cheerfully scoffed, “Too commercial.)
The restaurant is owned by Catch Hospitality Group, the team behind last year’s bastion of unfathomable impenetrability, the Corner Store in Soho, which Taylor Swift put on the map almost from day one. That place, where Vignola is also in charge of the kitchen, seems less about his food than about the scene.
So my hopes for The Eighty Six’s menu were restrained.
They shouldn’t have been. While I was cranky that no bread was served at the start of a meal, two meaty, horseradish-drizzled dill pickles offered instead got me over it.
There was also brown butter-toasted sourdough to scoop bluefin tuna tartare ($29). A gleaming round of wonderfully fresh fish was centered atop a ring of shaved Persian cucumber, crowned with Osetra caviar and drizzled with aged soy and cold-pressed Sicilian olive oil. It was a perfectly calibrated dish — from the soy to the sourdough — with each flavor at once distinct and complementary.
The 8-ounce filet mignon “Rossini” ($65) — sourced from the Jeffrey Huss family in Mitchell, South Dakota — is far from the usual lean, diet-friendly filet you find around town. The crust was perfectly seared. The meat, cooked to a precise medium-rare, was enhanced with a two-ounce mound of Hudson Valley foie gras and butter whipped from white Alba and black Burgundy truffles. Barolo-scented bordelaise sauce tied it all together for maximum, gut-busting thrills.
Wagyu cheesesteak ($39) laughed at even the fanciest takes on the Philadelphia warhorse. Westholme Australian Wagyu ribeye was thinly sliced and slow-roasted to a marvelously tender state, sparked with pickled peppers and chiles, and cloaked in a creamy blend of Hornbacher and Comté cheeses.
It wasn’t only about beef.
The Cresta di Gallo caviar pasta was a multi-layered flavor bonanza starring saffron-shallot sofrito, cream, robiola cheese, egg yolk, Calabrian chili oil and Osetra caviar. It was as unique as it was delicious.
“Flying saucer” ice cream sandwiches topped the short-and-sweet dessert list. The surprisingly reasonably-priced wine list includes a strong selection of excellent half-bottles.
The setting is plush and then some. Large, upholstered booths all but hug you. Light glows from Art Deco fixtures and gleams across lacquered dark woods and marbled floors. It’s the most seductive, neo-speakeasy shtick in town.
My 30-odd fellow diners looked dressed to party (no boldfaces among them), but I heard just discreet moans-and-groans of pleasure. Only a merry quartet of young women, consuming more cocktails than food, broke the spell.
Sadly, I had no time or room for seafood entrees ($37 to $110) or a giant, whole duck that’s aged for 10 days and served under an orange-blossom glaze with foie gras sausage.
I’d love to try the wondrous-sounding waterfowl another time. All I need is another friend to wave the magic wand and get me in.
