A High Steaks Game
Abartender shakes a Brandy Alexander to foamy completion. The voice of Frank Sinatra, clear as gin, fills the background with “Moonlight Serenade.” At Gallaghers Steakhouse, photos spanning the restaurant’s 96 years fill the walls: that’s New York governor Franklin Roosevelt, smiling from a convertible in 1930; there’s Joe DiMaggio’s fluid swing; the writer Damon Runyon wears his trademark carnation. Among some 350 framed images, racehorses alone comprise a veritable equine hall of fame. The historic surroundings elicit questions: “Is that one Man O’ War or Citation?” a diner wonders. “Who’s that jockey who rode two Triple Crown winners?” another asks. “Eddie Arcaro, riding Whirlaway and Citation,” his pal answers.
Dean Poll, the owner of Gallaghers Steakhouse on Manhattan’s West 52nd Street, has to think both like a restaurateur and the curator of a museum with an entire wing of art. Only, instead of tending to European oil paintings, Poll oversees images of Old New York. “I work here every day. I am thinking about the food and staff,” Poll says, sitting in a corner that could be called baseball cove. Over his right shoulder are stills of Lou Gehrig and the Yankees’ “Murderers’ Row” manager Miller Huggins. Jack Dempsey is clowning, grappling with a bat also held by Babe Ruth. “To Helen Gallagher, sincerely Babe Ruth,” the inscription reads. Poll gestures toward signed caricatures of Tiger Woods, Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus. “So I lose, to a certain extent, the importance of what’s on the walls. But the photos are the decor. They lend some hominess to the place. It’s the heart and soul of this restaurant. It’s not cheap decoration. The only thing missing is the cigar smoke,” adds Poll, who fancies a Partagás 8-9-8 “It’s what this restaurant is for 96 years.”
Gallaghers (which was originally styled with an apostrophe) remains unashamedly a purveyor of meats. Guests are greeted by the view of slabs of beef hanging in a dry-aging area behind paned glass. They make their way to red-leather banquettes or a place at the bar. The Broadway theatergoers who frequent Gallaghers peruse a menu dominated by calling-card cuts like the porterhouse, tomahawk and New York strip.
Ninety years ago, the restaurant’s patrons weren’t as gentile. It attracted a sporting crowd, followers of baseball, boxing and horse racing. Within a mile were 10 boxing arenas, six pool rooms and restaurants owned by boxers or baseball players. Many of the area’s denizens were the Runyonesque characters that inhabited his stories and the musical Guys and Dolls.
It is fitting perhaps that Gallaghers began life not as a steakhouse, but as a speakeasy. Helen Gallagher, a former Ziegfeld Follies girl, and her husband Ed, a stage comedian, opened Gallaghers at 228 West 52nd Street in 1927 amidst Prohibition. Competition was fierce. Some 32,000 illegal speakeasies dotted the city. The sporting set made Gallaghers home, disguising their illicit intentions by ordering the “special soup”: liquor served in a soup bowl. Ed Gallagher would die two years later and Helen married the colorful gambler Jack Solomon. When Prohibition ended, the two transformed the speakeasy into a steakhouse and began the tradition of decorating the walls with celebrity photos.
There were plenty of pictures to choose from. Just days after Gallaghers’ 1927 debut, the Alvin Theatre (now the Neil Simon Theatre) opened with Fred Astaire and his sister Adele dancing in Funny Face. Gallaghers was well placed to welcome the famous in a historically thrilling entertainment year. More than 70 legitimate theaters staged over 250 shows. Theater district options ranged from the grand—the 5,300-seat New York Hippodrome—to the picaresque—sword swallowers, snake charmers and flea circuses that one could see for a quarter.
New York sports were also having a banner year. Babe Ruth had once again broken his own record by blasting 60 home runs, the standard for the next 34 years. The Yankees’ roster, which included Lou Gehrig, swept Pittsburgh in the World Series. Ruth and his wife Helen lived a mile away. Closer still was Madison Square Garden’s third incarnation, a mammoth 18,500-seat arena, which had recently opened a few blocks from Gallaghers and was hosting “Friday Night Fights” as well as the occasional bicycle marathon. St. Nicholas Arena, 14 blocks north, was renowned for the many fledgling champions who fought there.
Boxers of the era and the area—lightweight Benny Leonard, middleweight Jimmy Walker and the cigar-smoking, multidivision champion Tony Canzoneri—opened competing bistros. The heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey often held forth at his own. Toots Shor’s, a few blocks from Gallaghers, was an upscale eatery regarded as the headquarters for celebrities from the ’40s to the ’60s. On any given night you might see Frank Sinatra or Joe DiMaggio. All are now gone.
Across New York City, storied restaurants have enjoyed illustrious runs: Luchow’s, the 21 Club, Elaine’s, The Four Seasons, The Cattleman. Some thrived for a few decades only to fade when the celebrities stopped coming ’round and the customers who went to see them stayed away in turn.
The same fate hasn’t befallen Gallaghers, now in its 10th decade. The celebrities haven’t gone away. Their likenesses are still here. And the eatery that was first buoyed by sports fans remains as relevant serving the theater district.
Not that there haven’t been bumps in the road. Gallaghers almost shuttered in 2012 when the widow of a subsequent owner announced her intention to close. Poll, who was running Central Park Boathouse at the time, stepped in and bought the restaurant in January 2013. He’d known the establishment decades before, having discovered it the same day he found out about cigars.
As a young man, while working for his father’s restaurant, Poll took a walk that led him first to the tobacconist Dunhill, which was then on 5th Avenue. Intrigued by the lockers bearing the names of luminaries such as Milton Berle, Yul Brenner, George Burns and Groucho Marks, he bought his first cigar, a Dunhill Montecruz No. 210. That started a cigar journey that has wended its way through such smokes as H. Upmann Churchills, Cohibas, Montecristo No. 2s and his after-dinner favorite, the Partagás 8-9-8.
Poll’s journey back to work that day made an equally enduring impression: “I came past this building at 228 West 52nd Street. It was Gallaghers and I saw that meat locker. I was 18 years old. I knew I wanted to have that restaurant.”
Not surprisingly, when Poll eventually did have that restaurant, he was interested in a “restoration,” not a “renovation.” He wisely resisted turning it into a “shiny new lawyer restaurant.” It shows. “You will know you are in Gallaghers, and you will know you’re in a place that has connections to theater, sports and politics,” he said before the restoration.
The horseshoe bar remains. So does the meat locker, a favorite of beef voyeurs taking pictures. “People come for the beef,” he says. Full stop. It’s the reason they serve up to 1,100 meals a day. Steaks are aged for 21 days. “Gallaghers has always been dry-aging its meat on the premises,” Poll says. “Dry aging is storing the meat at 34 degrees refrigerated with low humidity, allowing the enzymes to break down the meat and tenderize it, giving the meat a nutty flavor.” It’s another hallmark of the past.
But Gallaghers is about time and timelessness: the time it inhabits and time past. The restaurant has maintained its old-school demeanor even as it keeps pace with the years. It remains lively and busy, with tables filled even at lunchtime, that horseshoe-shaped bar lined up with patrons sipping strong drinks and tucking into hearty steaks. Poll details some concealed changes: “The kitchen is all brand new. There is not a wire or water pipe in this building that was not replaced.” He looks around with satisfaction. One could imagine the famous photos from the walls all around him nodding in silent approval. “It looks more like a 96-year-old restaurant today than when I took it over.”
Kenneth Shouler is a frequent contributor to Cigar Aficionado.
