The Eighty-Six Wants You to Want In

Exclusivity, like any product, gets more valuable the more people want it; it is both the cruellest and the most honest thing that a restaurant can sell. The Eighty-Six, a mega-swank steak house that opened in the West Village last fall, was, from Day One, clubby, celeb-packed, and impossible to get into—no surprise, as it’s the latest from Catch Hospitality Group, which previously brought us the impossible-to-get-into Corner Store. There are just eleven tables, and for a long while I had no interest in occupying any of them. That is, until a friend of mine—a very fancy friend—mentioned that she might be able to get me a reservation, and I was transformed, almost instantly, quite embarrassingly, into a person who had never wanted to be in any restaurant more urgently in my life. This is the confidence trick of exclusivity, and I am apparently a total mark: is there anything more alluring than a closed door that opens just for you?

The door, here, is green and weighty, with a wrought-iron grille over a central peephole, and has been here for ages. The building is the erstwhile home of the infamous speakeasy Chumley’s, and its address, 86 Bedford Street, is said to be the origin of “eighty-six,” Prohibition-era slang for “Get lost.” Like 4 Charles Prime Rib, another well-guarded mega-luxury oubliette in the West Village, with which it draws inevitable comparison, the Eighty-Six is a very good steak house. The Catch team has entirely remade the space in weighty, rich tones—dark woods, bronzed mirrors, copper velvets. A two-top, tucked into an alcove by the (working) fireplace, was purportedly the favored table of F. Scott Fitzgerald. You could, as he presumably did, get full-on blotto—an applewood-smoked Martini, theatrically poured tableside atop a stalagmite of ice grown, science-fair-style, from hyper-chilled water, is excellent, and potent as hell—but, in the sight lines of so many diners’ iPhones filming so much faux-blasé vertical content, it might be ill-advised.