Mob Mentality

Golden Steer celebrates Sin City's seedy history and reinforces its reputation for so-so food.

- BY MATTHEW SCHNEIER

Golden Steer 1 Fifth Ave., at E. 8th St. goldensteer.​com

THE STEAKHOUSE, that most American of restaurant genres, has in recent years been co-opted by foreign interests. To be a steakhouse with an unstamped passport will simply no longer do. There are Korean steakhouses, Japanese steakhouses, Thai steakhouses, and Spanish steakhouses; there's an English steakhouse and un steakhouse Lyonnais.

The city's newest steakhouse, however, is a domestic visitor. Golden Steer (no the), recently driven in from Las Vegas, where the original iteration has stood off the strip for 68 years, is all-American to the marrow. The cowboy-and-galloping-steed paintings in the front dining room are stroke-by-stroke recreations of their Nevadan predecessors, and round these parts, a New York strip is a “shorthorn.” A cigar-shop Doc Holliday slot machine stands in a corner, and a roulette wheel is set into one wall, though the game remains, for now, illegal in New York.