The Las Vegas-ification of New York Continues at Catch Steak

(Bloomberg) -- New York City steakhouses are not what they used to be.

One of the city’s most signature dining experiences—a dark-walled space with serious tables and chairs, a handful of prime beef options, and a cursory fish exemplified by Peter Luger or Keens—is now wide open to interpretation. A place like Cote, the buzzy Korean BBQ spot whose menu features a ‘ butcher’s feast,’ is now one of the city’s top steak destinations. These meat-centric spots are rarely even called steakhouses anymore, preferring to avoid any toxic masculinity baggage with the more nostalgic ‘chophouse,’ a place that historically highlighted a more diverse menu of proteins. It’s an example set by high-rolling spots such as The Grill in Midtown and Thomas Keller’s TAK Room inHudson Yards and the upcoming revival of Gage & Tollner in Brooklyn, opening later this year. 

This aversion to the steakhouse label comes not coincidentally at a time when red meat consumption is creeping downward in the U.S. while demand for plant-based meat increased by 37% in North America from 2017 to 2019. In fact, if you were a restaurant investor considering options, a gigantic new steakhouse a block away from your existing seafood spot might give you pause.

Yet here we are with Catch Steak, the latest from Catch Hospitality Group, known for their party-centric, celebrity-packed seafood haunts. (To set the scene: Model Annika Backes met her now-husband DJ Tiësto at Catch NYC in 2015.)

Catch’s new steakhouse comes at a time when the country’s balance of restaurant power has shifted ever-increasingly west away from Manhattan to the sunny streets of Los Angeles, a place where Food & Wine’s restaurant editor will soon call home, and Bon Appétit’s newly-anointed Best New Restaurant in America specializes in milk bread sandos. All this while New York’s biggest openings of 2019 have been at the mall-like Hudson Yards or are reboots of past concepts, like Pastis and Gotham Bar & Grill. The high cost of doing business in the city, namely real estate and labor costs, are impeding enterprising new concepts. 

The Catch brand started in the Meatpacking District in 2011 and now has outposts in Las Vegas, Playa del Carmen, Mexico, and Los Angeles. The latter’s location, with its supersized neon hook logo and tropical plant-lined entrance, is Instagram’s most geo-tagged restaurant in the country; #CatchLA has over 50,000 posts.

Catch Steak looks set for equal fanfare. Jamie Foxx’s Instagram story gave viewers a seat at the pre-opening dinner, and Michael Jordan celebrated his entry into the premium celebrity tequila club, Cincoro, on the restaurant’s opening night Sept. 18. Co-owner Mark Birnbaum calls the place a steakhouse ‘remix’ and for people whose concept of night life has shifted.

“When we were young, we were club kids, then we started doing dinners with our friends. Now I don’t know anyone who wants to go to clubs,” says Birnbaum. 

A DJ booth occupies the upstairs lounge, but there’s no DJ in the main dining room. It’s got more seating than Tao group’s new Cathédrale, which seats over 300. The two-story, 15,000-square-foot Catch Steak has over 450 total seats including around 140 on the elevated terrace that sits over Ninth Avenue. Even in this surprising era of Vegas-sized restaurants hitting New York, it’s massive, announcing itself in a land of oversized entities. 

David Rockwell’s design carves Catch Steak into separate spaces so it doesn’t feel as cavernous as it sounds. During the day, the main dining room has the look of an underwater seafood haunt, with soft turquoise blue walls highlighted by gold leaf, and a round mirror that calls to mind a giant porthole. In keeping with Catch’s greenery aesthetic, the place could double as an arboretum.

In fact, the place is intent on being a destination for a Meatpacking District crowd that will fight over the small plates. There’s a hefty array of raw bar options, like a ‘Colossal Crab Cocktail’ as well as wedge salads, and potato churros topped with caviar. 

“It’s very theatrical,” observed my dining companion, a hedge fund software developer early on in the Catch Steak experience. It’s not a compliment.

The theatrics start at the bar where the Up in Smoke rye whiskey cocktail infused by a Breville smoke kitchen tool and presented in an empty light fixture. “It’s just a Manhattan,” said the developer of the $19 drink. They continue with a dish of burrata that is drizzled tableside with truffle honey before anyone can stop it from happening. The blanket of acrid truffle kills whatever creamy dairy sweetness the cheese came to the table with ($21). Bluefin tuna tartare is treated like steak by topping it with a cured egg yolk ($23). It’s presented in a bowl of ice that makes the fish too cold, simultaneously solidifying the gunky egg that coats it when its mixed in.

There aren’t many places that make Carbone, the high-flying Italian-American dining room, seem like a bargain. At Catch Steak there’s a hard sell on the ‘Foccacio di Catch,’ a “hand-stretched” flatbread the size of a frisbee that’s laced with stracchino cheese and goes for $21, as a starter for the table. It’s fine, but not nearly as good as the grandma bread that’s doled out at Carbone and that’s free.

Likewise, a diner could count the number of gigli, the housemade pasta coated with Calabrian chile cream, that are on the small plate at Catch Steak for $19, and that are a lackluster imitation of Carbone’s spicy vodka rigatoni ($26). What’s very good are Papa’s spicy baked clams accented by fiery nduja butter and a grilled lemon half ($19). You might wish that other steakhouses made a habit of serving them.

The menu offers around 18 steak options with beef from the U.S. and Japan. Executive chef Mark Vignola, a veteran of Strip House (one of the New York’s remaining steakhouses) and Catch’s culinary director John Beatty, offer Japanese wagyu, of course, cooked on hot stones at the table, including both olive-fed beef from the Kagawa prefecture that goes for $42/oz and ‘true’ A5 Kobe NY Strip from the Hyogo prefecture that costs $45/oz. They use an 1800°F Montague infrared broiler for other protein preparations like an unremarkable 8-oz. truffle butter filet from Nebraska ($54); and the 32-day dry-aged cowgirl ribeye ($52), which is trimmed to be leaner than traditional ribeye. It sounds like a good idea for the health conscious steakhouse crowd, but the fat enriches the meat as it cooks. Trim it off and you’re left with tough steak slices arrayed around the bone that don’t have much flavor apart from the aged funk.  

Even for a place that doesn’t want to be defined as a steakhouse, it’s not a great sign when the dish that the staff recommends most enthusiastically—for good reason—is meatless. It’s the vegetarian chicken parm, made with a plant-based cutlet draped with a thin slice of melted mozzarella and a chunky tomato sauce. The cutlet has a satisfying chew and the sauce has a rich concentrated taste and its the dish you want to go back for.

In the end, Catch Steak has a Las Vegas clubby sheen without being out of control and the service is highly attentive; it also feels clean—not something that describes every Meatpacking District restaurant. But the table skipped dessert. “Next time, Old Homestead,” said another one of my table mates, a hedge fund executive, who didn’t see the benefits of a return trip to try other meat selections. He might be an exception. By 9 p.m. the place was packed, mostly with men, looking  like they were recently featured on @midtownuniform. Although it’s only a few weeks old, Catch Steak is already primed for expansion.

“Usually I say focus on this,” says Birnbaum of the first spot, “but we’re open to expanding if it succeeds here. If this is a hit, I feel comfortable saying that.” Los Angeles, look out. Catch Steak could be on its way.

--With assistance from Amanda L Gordon.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Justin Ocean at jocean1@bloomberg.net

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