Minetta Tavern

Minetta Tavern opened on MacDougal Street in 1937 and spent decades as a writers' hangout — Hemingway, Ezra Pound, and the Village eccentric Joe Gould all passed through — before Keith McNally restored it in 2009 into a chophouse with the old bones intact. The checkerboard floor, the murals of old Greenwich Village, and the caricature-covered walls are original equipment; the white-jacketed service and the dry-aged Black Label burger are the revival's additions.

It reads as a steakhouse but eats like a French bistro that happens to take beef seriously. Dinner in one of the red leather booths, under the low lights, is one of the few downtown meals that feels like the New York of the photographs without being a museum of it.