December 14, 2005
Keens and the Missing Mutton Chop Posted by Richard F. Snow at 04:10 PM EST I was startled to learn today that a tangible link with the past I have several times enjoyed (not cheaply, but with far less expenditure than, say, a trip to Venice) is a fraud. This discovery also answered a question I’ve asked myself a number of times: Why, if it tastes so good, is mutton available only in one restaurant in a city in which you will have no difficulty finding a place that will serve you dogs’ eyes in rose water? In his review of Keens Steakhouse, the New York Time restaurant critic Frank Bruni reveals that the house’s famous mutton chop is not mutton at all! It hasn’t been for quite a while. Bruni explains that during World War II, “deprived Americans ate more mutton than they wanted, and as it later fell farther and farther out of fashion, getting fresh mutton of reliable quality became iffy. At some point Keens had to turn to lamb, choosing a cut with a winged shape that mimicked the mutton chop of yore.” I never saw that chop of yore, but I can tell you that what Keens puts before you in its stead is a highly impressive piece of architecture, tall, oval—and delicious. But even if the dish were still capable of disgusting a country that had managed to accustom itself to Spam casserole, Keens would be well worth a visit. The restaurant stands today where it has since 1885, at 72 West 36th Street, just east of Sixth Avenue. It is a marvel. Here is how the amiable restaurateur George Rector (himself the son of the owner of the famous turn-of-the-century Manhattan restaurant Rector’s) described it in 1939: “On its way uptown, New York’s entertainment district paused at Fourteenth Street, leaving Luchow’s [the greatest of the city’s now all-but-vanished German restaurants] behind it, moved on to Twenty-third Street, Madison Square . . . and paused again at Thirty-fourth Street, Herald Square, before it reached its present magnificence at Times Square. It was while Herald Square was flourishing with theaters instead of Macy’s that Keen’s took root and grew. Across the street was the stage door to the old Garrick Theater, and the Lambs Club was in the same building. In fact, the Lambs were there first, and, when the chop house opened, John Drew, William Gillette, Clyde Fitch, and many others were its first, and thereafter regular, patrons. “In keeping with this theatrical heritage, the walls are now decorated with old prints of the theater and old playbills . . . dating back to the earliest days of the American theater. All of these are of great interest . . . but the most notable of all, no doubt, is the program President Abraham Lincoln held in his hands at Ford’s Theater on the night he was assassinated by the actor John Wilkes Booth.” They’re all still there, just as Rector describes them. And so are the pipes: “Another extraneous feature of interest is the hundreds, if not thousands, of clay pipes racked along the beamed ceilings. In a chop house, after a good, substantial dinner, men of arts and letters like to sit about the table and talk things over while they smoke their pipes. I don’t know why anyone would ever want to smoke a clay pipe—perhaps it is because men look so philosophical while doing it—but anyway, they did at Keen’s, and it was hard to get the pipe there and home again without breaking its long, fragile stem. And so the custom developed of leaving the pipe in the charge of mine host. The pipe was given a number, the number was registered in the name of the owner, and the pipe was stowed safely in its rack to await another visit.” This pipe register, says Rector, contains “a good many signatures that are autographs,” among them those of that inseparable duo Theodore Roosevelt and Eamon de Valera, George M. Cohan, of course, and, joining them in recent years, Dr. Ruth Westheimer and Liza Minnelli and Stephen King. “For all its memories, no restaurant can thrive much past the day of its last good meal,” Rector goes on, and, like the rest of his 66-year-old observations, this one holds true. Frank Bruni liked his meal at Keens, and you will like yours. Of course, there have been changes—but remarkably few. Even though the restaurant stood closed for years during New York’s disconsolate late 1970s, it is again the place Clyde Fitch would have recognized. The posters and playbills still sing their ancient shrillnesses from the walls, and the pipes hang in their skeletal infinities above you. The name has lost its apostrophe—for a century it was Keen’s—and it is no longer an “English Chop House” but a “Steakhouse.” The mutton chop is not, as it was billed on a 1937 menu, $1.65. But I know of no better place to get a sense of a vanished Manhattan, or a feeling of present well-being. If you can’t stay for the (non) mutton chop, go into the dark magnificence of the bar. You can still order the “suggestion of the day” for Friday, June 25, 1937: “TOM COLLINS Consisting of: 2 oz. Dry Gin; Half Lemon or Lime Juice; Sweetened with Sugar; Soda Water; Chopped Ice.” Just don’t expect to pay “35c.” for it.
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