What's French for 'Steakhouse'?

Daniel Boulud takes on America's burliest restaurant genre at La Tête d'Or.

- MATTHEW SCHNEIER

Walk west on 24th Street at twilight, as I recently did, and it’s hard not to notice the glow d’or. Emanating from the recently completed One Madison, a refurbished office tower home to IBM and the global investment firm Franklin Templeton, the warm light is luxury in lumens: a flame for high-spend moths.

They have lately fluttered, from upstairs and outside, to La Tête d’Or, an expansive steakhouse from Daniel Boulud. Officially, according to the chef’s site, the restaurant “bridges Daniel’s two worlds: New York and France.” (Parc de la Tête d’Or is the elegant, English-style garden in Boulud’s native Lyon.) Unofficially, it seems designed to fill a gap in the Bouludian business portfolio. Ours is a sirloin metropolis and has been since the Tammany Hall era’s beefsteak banquets. Can you even call yourself a New York megarestaurateur without a steakhouse?