Just at the moment, Straker’s has sauce. It’s the bistro to broach, if you can. Reservations are scarce, and even the usually well connected have grudgingly joined a mid-afternoon queue for one or two of a handful of first-turn bar seats. You can’t miss the line; it’s right by the barely contained garbage. “I’m being such a loser waiting,” a Carrie Bradshaw type I know texted me one afternoon at the undignified hour of 4:30 p.m. But I had no right to judge. The week before, I’d lined up myself to see whether the hype was justified. At 4:28, I was third; the couple at the front, a good-looking girl in glasses and her bearded beau, had been there since four. They’d walked past the last distinguished hypestaurant, the Corner Store, where they clocked a line that had wrapped around the block by 3:45. “At least we’re not those people,” the girl said.
The clout gap in restaurants, like the wealth gap everywhere else, is yawning fast. Straker’s is one of a number of places opened this fall that have cemented a depressing new normal by stationing bouncers outside their doors. But Dorsia is an investor of Straker’s. In the deal, the members-only, pay-to-play reservation club (named, of course, for the restaurant that always remained just out of Patrick Bateman’s reach) received the right to market a good number of Straker’s 18 or so tables to its users, with fist dibs going to the premium membership tiers.
Nothing succeeds like intimations of exclusivity, so on my visits to Straker’s, I wasn’t surprised to see Blake Lively, Jalen Brunson, and Josh Hart one night and Anna Wintour and John Benjamin Hickey, the director of Other Desert Cities, this Broadway season’s reigning $800 ticket, another. It’s a place made for craning your neck with pocket-nook bar tables and a back dining room whose interrupted geometry offers only partial views — the enforced myopia of the VIP section. Expensively and beautifully renovated in five-star hotel-lobby style, it’s as silky as a fashion shoot, for the staff as much as the guests. “Look,” a companion of mine whispered about our jovial waiter as thumping music deafened the Damien Hirst–hanged dining room, “he’s dripping in Cartier and Tiffany.”
Thomas Straker is a London import with a hot-boy posh roué persona and a few million TikTok followers for videos extolling butter. Given that, his cooking is surprisingly accomplished. It’s more cosmopolitan than English. That is, nationless: a little Anglo, a little Italian, a little French. A few of the more regional specialties of Straker’s London restaurants have been adapted to American palates — partridge there is duck here — while many of the signature dishes have migrated in one form or another so that members of an intercontinental crowd can safely advise one another to order the famous mussel flatbread.
You should get that mussel flatbread, a small, $26 pizza round happily puffed and charred and sheened with chile butter that causes the mussels to slip and slide as if on skates. Take their lead: The modular menu is built for speed, and the kitchen — the main one open and tightly packed around a roaring, newly installed wood-burning oven — keeps things pumping. The restaurant has sauce; the food is saucy, especially compared with most American cooking. Dishes fly out in frothy waves, and everything glides along on a gorgeous slick. Skewers of lamb and Jimmy Nardello pepper in a pool of umber oil sweetened with apricot. A snarl of homemade tagliolini with a glistening, pungent toss of chanterelles (for the mushrooms, the menu employs the Anglicism girolles). A $48 grilled half-chicken with a chimichurri-ish “jalapeño verde” and a pile of melting lentils or an $88 roasted half-duck with collapsing figs. Here, a waiter announced, is a salad of bitter leaves with a cold snow shower of “goat’s cheese,” as they call the stuff in the U.K., which comes from “one of the oldest goat farms in the country.” Which country? “This one!”
Straker is the latest in a line of English arrivals to titillate the city with butter and brusqueness. (Is it beneath the dignity of this column to mention that an affair with Princess Olympia of Greece is reported to have foundered Straker’s marriage? Probably.) The restaurant sits in the former site of Keith McNally’s Lucky Strike, whose spirited grubbiness has been so thoroughly buffed and disinfected as to be nearly unrecognizable, even with a “Lucky Strike” Haring on the wall and a “Lucky Strakers”–painted ceramic urn on the bar. Straker’s does its best to snatch some borrowed glory, but this restaurant — with a gloss no McNally establishment ever attempted — isn’t any kind of descendant of Lucky Strike. Straker’s has heat without cool, which can’t be bought or designed.
At a stripling 36, Straker is already acting like a much more seasoned imperial restaurateur. He has two restaurants in London; his butter line, All Things, is available throughout the U.K. and UAE and at your local Whole Foods. The New York restaurant, in the capable hands of chef de cuisine Luka Coyne, is serving a crowd that’s as rarefied as any in the city with food that’s better than they have any right to expect. Without a Knicks championship ring or a $5,000 Dorsia ante, though, good luck joining them. In time, when the buzz inevitably dies down, maybe Straker’s will evolve from a clubhouse into that more boring, useful thing: a restaurant. Until then, you can grab a logo-stamped matchbook from the bowl by the bouncer, no entry required. Bad-boy Thomas may consider himself a firebrand. What we have here is a brand, and it’s on fire.
Scratchpad
Straker’s
Location, Location, Location
At Lucky Strike, the best vibes were at the bar. Here, VIPs all head to the back dining room.
A Resy Rec
The only reservations I ever saw come up via Resy were same-day single seats, usually either very early or after 8 p.m.
Chef Not in Residence
If you’re looking for Straker himself, don’t bother — a month after the restaurant opened, he was traveling in Bhutan.
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If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the November 16, 2026, issue of
New York Magazine.
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Dining and Cooking