Call a Month Ahead or Eat Somewhere Else
Ralph Lauren's Midtown East restaurant is a phone-booking bottleneck, a subterranean tartan-and-equestrian dining room, and a burger that holds up. In that order.
Down a staircase off East 55th, past the doorman and through the upstairs bar where a fireplace is going and fried olives arrive without asking, the main dining room reveals itself: low ceilings, tartan, oil paintings of horses, and a room full of people who called a month ago to the calendar date and won. The corned beef sandwich arrives on a wooden board. Someone at the next table has a Bloody Mary and is not looking at their phone.
The Polo Bar is Ralph Lauren's first New York restaurant, and it functions less like a restaurant than like a members' club with a public phone number. The food is American — steaks, a burger, a Caesar, a brownie — cooked competently and priced for the address. What you are buying is the room and the door policy. Whether that math works depends entirely on how you feel about calling a phone number a month ahead.
A restaurant that serves a $38 sandwich and asks you to phone a month ahead to eat it.
Editorial Deep
The steaks are the weak link. A 22-oz bone-in rib eye at $120, a 16-oz strip at $98, a 10-oz filet at $95 — priced against the city's serious steakhouses without cooking against them. The meat is fine. The sauces (peppercorn, chimichurri, horseradish cream) are fine. Nothing on the steak menu is a reason to come, and if you came for a steak you would have been better at Keens or Peter Luger for less friction and more conviction on the plate.
The entrance gives away nothing. A discreet door on East 55th, a doorman who checks the name, and a staircase — the room is subterranean and none of it is visible from the street, which is a deliberate act of theatre before you have sat down. Upstairs is the bar: dark wood, a working fireplace, fried olives on the house, and the kind of light that flatters everyone. Downstairs is the main event.
Service in the main dining room is professional in the old sense — jackets, pacing, no announcements of the specials as if they were being invented on the spot. The staff know the menu, keep the water topped up, and clear at the right moments.
The burger is the price the bill is easiest to defend. It comes with hand-cut fries, cheddar, bacon, the works, and it eats like the better hotel-bar burgers in the city — the Bemelmans burger, the Bar Room burger at The Modern. On the burger alone, the math is honest. Widen out and it gets harder: $120 for a bone-in rib eye that would cost less at a place cooking beef more seriously, and appetizers priced for the postcode rather than the plate.
The first visit is a rib eye and a bottle of something, because that is what people order at a Ralph Lauren steakhouse the first time. The second visit is the corned beef sandwich, the burger, a martini upstairs by the fire, and out by 9:30. That is the version of this restaurant that works — treat it as a bar with a dining room attached, order the sandwiches, use the room for what it is good for, and leave the $120 rib eye to someone else.
What to eat
Don't miss.
Ralph's Corned Beef Sandwich ($38), The Polo Bar Burger ($38), the brownie
“A scene priced as a scene, with a burger and a corned beef sandwich that hold up.”
Order the sandwiches and the burger, skip the steaks, and if the phone ritual isn't for you, Keens does the steakhouse thing with more conviction and Bemelmans does the room-and-a-drink better.
The Verdict
