When it comes to Las Vegas restaurants, the cultural exchange tends to flow inward, not out. At every level of dining, from cheap chain to ultra-luxe destination, the city has imported big-name brands from elsewhere—a Spago here, a Momofuku Noodle Bar there. There’s an outpost of New Orleans’s Turkey and the Wolf, and a branch of the downtown Manhattan pizzeria Scarr’s; hell, there was even a Rao’s, for a while, and it was actually pretty easy to get a table there. The city absorbs these establishments and then does what it does to everything: amplifies, simplifies, suspends in amber.
Now the Las Vegas restaurant Golden Steer, an icon of the Sin City steak-house scene, has opened in New York City. Seeing the migration run in the other direction—Vegas to the world—feels almost off-kilter, a little unnerving, though not uncompelling. If any Vegas-endemic restaurant were going to attempt the crossing, Golden Steer is the one to do it: it has the branding, and the mythology, and certainly the point of view. Opened, in 1958, as a cowboy-themed joint, the restaurant was off-Strip, freestanding, deliberately removed from the casino world it served. The city’s hotels, still rigidly racially segregated, wouldn’t allow Black performers to dine in the very venues where they headlined, but the Golden Steer, a stand-alone restaurant, did not abide by such restrictions, so it became the favored post-show spot of the Rat Pack: Sammy Davis, Jr., would hold court at booth No. 20, Dean Martin at No. 21, Frank Sinatra at No. 22. Their presence drew other celebrities: Elvis liked to order an off-menu hamburger; Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio shared a favorite table while they were married; after their divorce, Marilyn staked out a separate spot, right in front of Joe. Booth No. 11 is dedicated to Oscar Goodman, the notorious mob attorney and eventual mayor of Las Vegas, whose Golden Steer dinners with Tony (the Ant) Spilotro were dramatized in Scorsese’s “Casino.” (Goodman, ever the showman, played himself.) In the half century since its heyday, the restaurant has layered a second motif over its nominal cowboy getup: it’s a memorial to Old Las Vegas, before a veneer of family-friendliness settled over the town like a beauty filter. What it sells, today, is not steak but nostalgia—a specific, gaudy, morally complicated American moment that the rest of Vegas has largely paved over.