Keens Steakhouse

Keens has been serving dinner off Herald Square since 1885, and the ceilings tell the story: tens of thousands of clay churchwarden pipes, once kept for regulars, hang overhead in every room. The walls are a museum of old New York — playbills, portraits, a dining room named for Abraham Lincoln — and the floors creak the way floors should in a place this old.

The order is the mutton chop. It is enormous, it arrives with escarole and a history lesson, and it has outlived nearly every restaurant trend of the last century. If a full dinner is more commitment than the evening allows, the dark wood bar room pours serious single malts under the same pipe-hung ceiling. This is the special-occasion steakhouse to choose when you want the occasion to feel like it happened in New York and nowhere else.