Fresh Meat

British import Hawksmoor is a steakhouse where you can order the fish.

- By Adam Platt

AS COVID TAKES its time ebbing away from the life of the city, all sorts of welcome signs of recovery are springing up around town. Broadway is open again, of course, and the last time I wandered down Restaurant Row on 46th Street, herds of goggle-eyed tourists were jostling for space along the sidewalks just like in the old days. The lean-to sheds up and down the avenues are made of sturdier materials for the coming cold weather, and many are set with proper four-tops and strings of decorative lights. A few vanished establishments are even coming back to life (hello, Gotham), and here and there the kind of theatrical, big-money, high-concept restaurants that used to open weekly, like Broadway plays, during the boom years seem to be slowly returning to the landscape.

The long-awaited New York outlet of the U.K. steakhouse franchise Hawksmoor is one of these places, and though your humble critic is as skeptical of the ridiculous phrase U.K. steakhouse