Golden swirl

La Tête d’Or (Flatiron)

RESTAURANTS • First Person

The entrance to Daniel Boulud’s brand new La Tête d'Or feels less like the fine dining restaurant it is, and more like the lobby of a Park Avenue South office building (which, as part of a redesigned office tower, it also very much is). When we arrived early Wednesday evening, the greeters spit out paper slips from a machine below their stand, as if we ordered ice cream to be picked up at the counter.

It was a lowbrow start to what would be a very highbrow evening.

Coats checked and reservation confirmed, we were escorted past an opulent, mirrored, darkly lit bar into the restaurant’s gorgeous, double-height dining room dotted with plush banquettes and formally dressed servers already in midseason form. A massive open kitchen lines one side of the space. It’s the most impressive new dining room in Manhattan since Café Carmellini, another double-height with generous banquettes.

The room shrinks at the table; the acoustics are good, the plateware and glassware impressive, set atop white linens and framed by lush curtains on the windowless walls. Even the font is beautiful (and evocative of the lettering at the other terrific d’Or of the season — Le Veau d’Or, where a stylized wordmark also rims elegant plates.)

The menu is steakhouse and French, with about a dozen cuts and another dozen sauces or butters. Our server’s recitation of the options was like a graduate-level meat course, which may have annoyed us if it wasn’t delivered with such precision and evident enjoyment.

There are many options to push a meal at La Tête d'Or into a realm only appropriate for finance expense accounts — a $50 sauce here, a $600 steak special there — but we kept it on the simpler side: steak tartare, tableside Caesar, mussels gratinées, and the prime rib trolley.

The result was spectacular, from those sauces (the bordelaise and béarnaise accompanying the prime rib) to the sides (pommes purée and creamy spinach) to the meat itself, a crusted, buttery, deep pink American wagyu. The tartare was impeccable; the mussels, elite, served on the half shell with a chorizo-saffron crust. Only the Caesar missed, wan in comparison to its theatrical production.

Before dessert, we lingered for a moment over a glass of wine, taking in the room, which had since filled with a well-dressed mix of holiday revelers, work groups, and ambitious dates. A couple of smaller two tops had been placed awkwardly between banquettes, suggesting that maybe not all experiences would be equal at La Tête d'Or.

But that dessert alone is enough to make even those P&L-stuffers worth booking: the pécan joconde, oui, and especially the soft serve sundae. It sounds like a gimmick too far — Daniel Boulud does Dairy Queen — but god was it good. Ours was a vanilla and berry-cassis swirl, with chocolate sauce and housemade toppings (sprinkles, passionfruit marshmallow, brownies), presented like tartare accompaniments in delicate scoops on a plate with six semi-circle cutouts. It’s the kind of delight you might get served in a plastic dish over an ice cream counter after handing in your paper slip — if a chef who worked for a decade at Daniel happened to be behind it. –Josh Albertson

→ La Tête d’Or (Flatiron) • 318 Park Ave S • Tues-Sat 5-11p • Reserve (N.B. Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve availability).