Nightlife
The Booths Are Gone, a New Life for Donohue's on Lexington
Jon Neidich takes over the old Upper East Side saloon and promises to restore what the family left behind
The awning on Lexington Avenue now says only Steak House. The family name above the door is gone, and so are the black booths and the long wooden bar. What remains inside 845 Lexington Avenue are the dark paneled walls and the checkerboard floor, and a new tenant who says he wants to bring the rest of the feeling back.
Donohue's Steak House served its last supper on June 19 after 76 years near the corner of East 64th Street. This week the New York Times reported who comes next. Jon Neidich, the downtown restaurateur behind Golden Age Hospitality, has signed a lease on the space. He plans to open a new restaurant there next spring. It will not be called Donohue's. But he says he wants to rehabilitate the room rather than gut it.
What the Family Took With Them
Martin Donohue opened the place in April 1950. He and his son Michael built the decorative wooden backbar that greeted everyone who walked in. Michael took it over, and after he died in 2000 his daughter, Maureen Donohue-Peters, ran it for the next quarter century.
It was a room that did not pretend. The bartenders wore white shirts and black ties without irony. The martini came with its extra pour in a sidecar on the bar. The paper place mats promised Lunch, Dinner, and Supper, and Donohue-Peters told Grub Street that supper meant the meal after nine, for the theater crowd. Gay Talese was a regular. So were politicians, anchors, and neighbors who had been coming since the 1960s.
When the lease neared its end, Donohue-Peters decided to leave on her own terms. She had already opened Donohue's East in Westhampton Beach with her niece Mary Barrie in the summer of 2025, and she wanted a quieter life out on Long Island. She also made clear that the name was not for sale. She was willing to sell the interior, but only as a whole and only to someone she trusted.
That deal did not happen. According to the cocktail writer Robert Simonson in his newsletter The Mix, Donohue-Peters and Neidich could not agree on a price, so she took the old bar and the booths with her. The wooden walls stayed. So did the black and white floor.
Aesthetically, my goal is to keep as much as possible of what it was. It will be a lot of restoration and some preservation.
That is Neidich, as quoted by Simonson. The Times adds that some of the retro details may survive, and possibly even the broiler.
A Downtown Operator Heads Uptown
Neidich has built his name downtown, and his group has been busy. Golden Age recently opened Saint Denis, a wine bar on LaGuardia Place, where the bartender Sarah Morrissey now pours. Taking over an Upper East Side chophouse is a different kind of job. The regulars who loved Donohue's were not looking for a scene. They were looking for the same booth and the same burger they had ordered for decades.
DiningOut reports that Neidich is leaning toward a chophouse menu, though nothing is settled yet. That would be the smart play. The neighborhood has lost enough of its old dining rooms, and a steakhouse in this space would not have to explain itself.
New York has watched this move before. When the Frenchette team revived Le Veau d'Or a few blocks away, they kept the bones of an old French room and gave it a second life. Grub Street reported in April that the Frenchette group was among the names floated as possible buyers for the Donohue's interior. In the end it went to someone else.
The Room Is the Point
The lesson of Donohue's was never the food. The menu was a greatest hits record of the Eisenhower years, from shepherd's pie to London broil, written on a chalkboard at the back. The point was the room. It was long and narrow and dim, with no screens on the walls. You could come in alone and leave with three new friends, as Donohue-Peters once put it to the West Side Spirit.
That kind of room is hard to build from scratch. It takes decades of the same bartenders, the same lamps, and the same regulars arguing about the same things. Neidich cannot buy that. What he can do is keep the walls, keep the floor, and fill the gaps with care.
The real Donohue's lives on in Westhampton Beach, and another location with a second niece is planned on Long Island. On Lexington Avenue the room stays dark until spring. When they come back on in the spring, the test will be simple. Does it still feel like the place you go after the show, when the city is tired and you want a drink poured by someone who has done it ten thousand times? For another big name folding old rooms into something new, see Daniel Boulud's return across from Lincoln Center in Open From Morning to Late.