Just at the moment, Straker\u2019s has sauce. It\u2019s 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\u2019t miss the line; it\u2019s right by the barely contained garbage. \u201cI\u2019m being such a loser waiting,\u201d 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\u2019d 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\u2019d walked past the last distinguished hypestaurant, the Corner Store, where they clocked a line that had wrapped around the block by 3:45. \u201cAt least we\u2019re not those people,\u201d the girl said.<\/p>\n
The clout gap in restaurants, like the wealth gap everywhere else, is yawning fast. Straker\u2019s 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\u2019s. 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\u2019s reach) received the right to market a good number of Straker\u2019s 18 or so tables to its users, with fist dibs going to the premium membership tiers.<\/p>\n
Nothing succeeds like intimations of exclusivity, so on my visits to Straker\u2019s, I wasn\u2019t 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\u2019s reigning $800 ticket, another. It\u2019s a place made for craning your neck with pocket-nook bar tables and a back dining room whose interrupted geometry offers only partial views \u2014 the enforced myopia of the VIP section. Expensively and beautifully renovated in five-star hotel-lobby style, it\u2019s as silky as a fashion shoot, for the staff as much as the guests. \u201cLook,\u201d a companion of mine whispered about our jovial waiter as thumping music deafened the Damien Hirst\u2013hanged dining room, \u201che\u2019s dripping in Cartier and Tiffany.\u201d<\/p>\n
Thomas Straker is a London import with a hot-boy posh rou\u00e9 persona and a few million TikTok followers for videos extolling butter. Given that, his cooking is surprisingly accomplished. It\u2019s 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\u2019s London restaurants have been adapted to American palates \u2014 partridge there is duck here \u2014 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.<\/p>\n
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 \u2014 the main one open and tightly packed around a roaring, newly installed wood-burning oven \u2014 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 \u201cjalape\u00f1o verde\u201d 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 \u201cgoat\u2019s cheese,\u201d as they call the stuff in the U.K., which comes from \u201cone of the oldest goat farms in the country.\u201d Which country? \u201cThis one!\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2019s marriage? Probably.) The restaurant sits in the former site of Keith McNally\u2019s Lucky Strike, whose spirited grubbiness has been so thoroughly buffed and disinfected as to be nearly unrecognizable, even with a \u201cLucky Strike\u201d Haring on the wall and a \u201cLucky Strakers\u201d\u2013painted ceramic urn on the bar. Straker\u2019s does its best to snatch some borrowed glory, but this restaurant \u2014 with a gloss no McNally establishment ever attempted \u2014 isn\u2019t any kind of descendant of Lucky Strike. Straker\u2019s has heat without cool, which can\u2019t be bought or designed.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s as rarefied as any in the city with food that\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s on fire.<\/p>\n
\n Scratchpad\n <\/p>\n
Straker\u2019s<\/p>\n
Location, Location, Location
At Lucky Strike, the best vibes were at the bar. Here, VIPs all head to the back dining room.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Chef Not in Residence
If you\u2019re looking for Straker himself, don\u2019t bother \u2014\u00a0a month after the restaurant opened, he was traveling in Bhutan.<\/p>\n
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