Staff Blog
CHOP TILL YOU DROP: An inside look at Butcher & Singer
categories | Openings
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| Photo | Drew Lazor |
No bull: Stephen Starr’s Butcher & Singer (1500 Walnut St.) opens in less than two weeks. Pictures and details after the jump.
“We wanted to bring the scale of the room down,” Steve Scott, director of restaurant development for Starr Restaurant Organization, told us during a recent walkthrough of Butcher & Singer, the golden-era chophouse they’ll unveil to the public on Mon., Oct. 27. He was referencing, in a broad sense, designer Shawn Hausman’s plan to convert the airtight grandeur of Striped Bass into a wood-and-leather habitat well-suited for Sterling-Cooper account execs and typing pool betties to link up for Perfect Manhattans at precisely five of 5. A tall order, literally — you seen the 28-foot ceilings?
Hausman (Parc, Continental Mid-town, the Continental and Buddakan outposts in AC) is clearly up for it. The soaring marble columns of Bass cordoning off the main dining room remain, but that’s basically the only recognizable remnant of the starmaking Starr venture. (The restaurant, which Neil Stein founded in 1994, was taken over by the restaurateur in 2004.) Those columns have been dressed in dark wood millwork, a great place to start if your aim is netting that 21 Club/Stork Club/Mad Men feel. Enormous chandeliers — originals from the first run of Miami’s swank Fontainebleau Hotel — help take the sheer enormity of the room down a notch. Fat leather “Hollywood booths” cozy up to houndstooth carpet on the elevated dining platforms on the east and west walls, and six more rest on either side of the palm tree-laden main dining floor. The windows, once shrouded in heavy gray drapes, now boast regal valances and mighty hanging shade that’ll do well lightening up lunchtime.
Hausman was inspired by a piece he came across in L.A. for the unforgettable dogs-tying-one-on mural; he commissioned a reproduction through a Manhattan commerical art firm. (The after-party for the dog poker game, perhaps?) Chef Shane Cash’s long open kitchen, which takes up the entire southern wall, is now partially obscured from the dining room by a pagoda-like decorative hood adorned with a bull’s head ornament that originated in Argentina. (Scott
says workers at Starr HQ had taken to plopping it on their
heads and charging at fellow employees prior to its installation.) And what’s become of the enormous fish that hung behind the kitchen in the Bass days? “The fish is safe and sound,” says Scott. “It will pop up again someday.”
Cash’s food will be classic American steakhouse through and through — chopped and Caesar salads tossed tableside, raw seafood platters, your Porterhouses, Delmonicos, lamb chops and Surf and Turfs. We’ll post menus here on Meal Ticket when we get them.
[...] CHOP TILL YOU DROP: An inside look at Butcher & Singer [Meal Ticket] Butcher and Singer [Official Site] geopress_addEvent(window,”load”, function() { geopress_makemap(56421,”Butcher and Singer”,39.94921,-75.166149,”google”,Mapstraction.ROAD, { pan: true, zoom: ’small’, overview: false, scale: false, map_type: false },15) }); [...]
nice tablecloths. way to take the most beautiful restaurant space in the city and turn it into a low end capital grille.
I think it looks really cheap, tacky, and dated–more of a late 1970’s feel. Maybe that’s the idea, but it’s a fail. The 70’s were the ugliest time in American history.
I think this is what the city needs. I’m tired of these stuffy steak houses. Esp. with the economy being what it is. I need a fun, more affordable place to get a great steak!
I work around the corner from Butcher & Singer and have been watching the progress and am very excited. The 70’s may have been a very unattractive time in our history but they were fun. I think that is what Steven Starr is trying to provide. Fun, affordable, classic american food is right up my alley.
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