A Legendary Las Vegas Steakhouse Lands in Greenwich Village

The Golden Steer holds near-mythic status in Las Vegas. Across its nearly seven decades, the famed steakhouse continues to wear its influence proudly on its decadent walls. In the late 1950s, when the restaurant still sported the atmosphere of a frontier outpost, cowboys donated rifles that hung above the dining room—an homage to the desert hunters who once brought their game to the restaurant’s butchers. Over time, the clientele shifted. The Golden Steer became a favored haunt of notorious mafiosos such as Tony “the Ant” Spilotro, who guzzled martinis there with his lawyer, future Las Vegas mayor Oscar Goodman; the former’s name now anoints a booth. Rat Pack royalty soon followed. Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin often arrived after performances on the Strip, turning the once-humble steakhouse into a favored late-night gathering place for entertainment A-listers. It even earned a cameo in Casino. 

When co-owner Amanda Signorelli began studying that layered history, the second-generation restaurateur uncovered surprising ties to New York through many of the entertainers who once passed through its doors. The discovery carried a certain logic: Two cities long celebrated for their dining cultures share a robust cadre of performers, artists, and nightlife legends. For Signorelli, the connection pointed toward a natural next chapter. Golden Steer recently opened at One Fifth Avenue, a storied Greenwich Village address whose own past rivals that of the Vegas original. In the 1970s, Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith spent long evenings at One Fifth, the dining room where brothers Brian and Keith McNally honed their craft before launching their own restaurant empires. Mapplethorpe photographed Smith on the building’s 27th floor for the cover of her landmark album Horses, staging the portrait in the apartment of art collector Sam Wagstaff.  

With all this history in tow, Signorelli resisted the temptation to simply paste the Golden Steer’s winning Las Vegas formula into this layered setting. Instead, she opted for a more sensitive approach. “We treated this as a bridge between Las Vegas and New York, staying true to Golden Steer in scale and indulgence with a New York seasonal point of view,” she says. For that task, she enlisted the design firm Modellus Novus, whose work in New York dining rooms Tatiana and Crown Shy wields a careful blend of theatrical flair and historical awareness. That sensibility proved well-suited to Golden Steer—yet for creative director Jonathan Garnett, the project began with an unexpected revelation. Despite having lived in Las Vegas years earlier, he had never dined at the steakhouse, which meant grasping its significance required deliberate study.  

“I wanted to understand the authentic atmosphere of Golden Steer while it was operating,” Garnett explains. The challenge extended further as his team needed to respect a restaurant with nearly seven decades of history while not overtly romanticizing its infamous clientele and situating it inside a landmark building that carries its own cultural legacy. Naturally, a fruitful research trip to Las Vegas with Signorelli, her co-owner husband Nick McMillan, and Modellus Novus head of communications and research Max Goldner ensued. “The last thing we wanted to do was create a stage set,” Garnett continues. “Finding authenticity while merging the two places with their own histories became a delicate balance.” 

He achieved that steadiness with poise and an urbane panache that immediately distinguishes itself among New York’s sundry steakhouses. The dining room unfolds as a decadent tableau that blends the vintage glamour of midcentury Vegas, Western iconography, and the compelling history of One Fifth Avenue without lapsing into pastiche. Guests pass through a 1920s-era revolving door trimmed with gold fringe and marquee bulbs before arriving at a 16-seat cocktail lounge that recalls the building’s original tenant, the famed #1 Bar. Mirrored ceiling panels and luminous ziggurat-style fixtures wrapped in fringe cluster around structural columns. Wall-to-wall scarlet carpeting, which Signorelli and McMillan described as a non-negotiable nod to casino floors, adds dashes of Vegas bravado. As does the menu by executive chef Brendan Scott, which offers classics like roasted bone marrow, a twice-baked potato, and a caesar salad theatrically assembled tableside on carts by tuxedoed waitstaff. 

References to the steakhouse’s roots appear at every turn. An authentic wooden casino roulette wheel from the 1960s occupies an entry alcove, facing a towering Doc Holliday slot machine that greets diners along a banquette-lined corridor called “The Strip.” Reproductions of Charles Marion Russell’s paintings of cowboys traversing rugged Western terrain hang above dining nooks, while archival imagery charts a parallel lineage of entertainers and cultural figures tied to both Las Vegas and One Fifth Avenue. Among them are 1930s-era self-portraits taken by Frank Sinatra at his parents’ home in Hoboken, a print of the Alice Cooper band gathered inside One Fifth Avenue when it operated as a hotel, Mapplethorpe’s portrait of William S. Burroughs, and images of Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, and the Rat Pack carousing backstage at Carnegie Hall.  

Further relics await inside two private dining rooms, appropriately named the Mob Room and the Showgirl Room. The latter dazzles with gold-trimmed wall panels and an original sequined headdress from the 1978 Don Arden revue “Hello Hollywood! Hello Heatwave!” The piece carries unusual significance—showgirl costumes rarely survive because casinos often destroyed them once productions closed. That detail reflects another sensitivity Garnett kept in mind throughout the design process, one that extends beyond avoiding easy romanticism around the city’s mob past. “Las Vegas frequently reinvents itself,” he says. “Photographs of the Golden Steer showed many different incarnations. Buildings are constantly demolished and rebuilt, so history operates differently there than it does in New York.” 

One trait the two cities share by necessity: air conditioning. A neon sign in the window announces it in plain language, a wink to the original Las Vegas restaurant where similar signage once beckoned passersby inside. The gesture draws on a broader tradition in which casinos often advertised basic comforts with striking directness, a phenomenon Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown famously observed in Learning From Las Vegas. While researching One Fifth Avenue, the design team discovered a newspaper advertisement that proudly touted the building’s air conditioning as well—a coincidence that made the detail feel almost inevitable.  

The sign seems to embody Signorelli’s broader goal for bringing Golden Steer eastward. “We absorbed the history already here—the building, the space, the residents, and the neighborhood,” she explains. “Then the room becomes a living thing. Guests celebrate milestones, become regulars, claim their table, and add their stories to the walls.”