Made To Order: A Postcard From Midtown Manhattan

What makes a restaurant an institution? The kind of place that you must visit at least once in your life. The kind of recommendation that comes with caveats, a place full of history and timelessness so don’t worry if its a little overpriced. The type of place where you should definitely eat the steak or try the soufflé. Places saved on your Google Maps, that you’ll go to one day.

A great piece of advice that stayed with me once, while spending a few days in Brussels a friend advised that in the city you can either have good food or a beautiful dining room, and not often both at the same time. If this is the case you should choose the beautiful dining room. Especially if you’re in Belgium, where the correct amount of Trappist beer should make up for a lack of culinary pleasure.

These dining institutions are as much a fabric of the city as its skyscrapers and cathedrals. Institution is a neutral term when it comes to the actual quality. That’s part of the charm, too. The slightly outdated service, which can be too polite or too rough, and the unchanged menu, with few conciliatory gestures to changing gastronomic trends and dietary requirements.

It is a bright morning in New York City, and we are in Midtown Manhattan, and the blue sky can only just be glimpsed through row after row of International Style skyscrapers. Your eyes are drawn up towards their monolithic outlines, and down long endless grids of avenues. At street level though is the usual, familiar bustle of New York. Even if the drama is intensified by the scale of the city above you.

We are here to spend a day working our way through some of Midtown’s finest dining Institutions, and break in some of our newest Drake’s Made To Order purchases, specifically a selection of double breasted jackets.

The double breasted jacket is perfect for this daytime dining activity. The kind of jacket that elevates, adds drama, an elegant drape when unbuttoned, can become more formal or casual as the mood requires.

Midtown Manhattan is the brash, beating heart of New York City. It is the largest business district on earth and home to its most expensive retail street.

We come up from the subway into the heaving commerce of The Diamond District and its grubby, glitzy aura of commerce, its row of store fronts hint at riches and well made deals. We are on our way to Grand Central Station, its Main Concourse, cavernous and overwhelming, throbs and beats with dramatic throngs of people. It’s like stepping into a scene of a movie. We head deep into the depths of the station, past the listening gallery, and into Grand Central’s Oyster Bar.

The space was designed by the Spanish-American architect Rafael Guastavino, whose terracotta tile vaulting appears across the city — at Ellis Island, at the Bronx Zoo — but nowhere more dramatically than here, arching overhead while the noise of the station filters down from above.

There’s an expanse of red and white table cloths, a tile-topped mahogany bar. It’s an elegant Art Deco oasis in the middle of the city. It opened in 1913 along with the station. You can imagine suited men having a quick stop off here before heading upstate for the weekend, or it acting as the backdrop for long, business lunches. The menu consists of a dozen different types of oyster, clams, lobsters, offered in all manner of preparations. Their names have the poetry of the Shipping Forecast: Cuttyhunk, Beavertail, Malpeque, Nisqually, Raspberry Point. It’s breakfast so we order Bloody Mary’s, a dozen oysters and it’s about as perfect a way to start the day as anything one could imagine.

Keen’s, tucked away between fifth and sixth avenues, is similarly out of step with the surrounding rush. Keen’s is a restaurant old enough to have been described as historic as long ago as 1954, and has been frequented by everyone from presidents to tourists. It’s a steakhouse in the English style, or at least a simulacrum of that, and it drips with an American nostalgia for the Old World.

Keen’s ceiling is covered in thousands of long, thin pipes, each numbered, that were stored on the premises by everyone from Roosevelt to Babe Ruth. The bar is all plush red leather, dark wood, heavy and thick with ancient, glossy varnish. The darkness is comforting on a warm, sunny day. We order beers and a slice of Key Lime Pie, a quick Cosmo to wash it down.

Keen’s is exactly the kind of place that functions as a short hand for a whole city. The kind of place everyone loves, but no one comes to as much as they would like to. A place still resolutely unchanging.

Keen's and Grand Central Oyster Bar lean lovingly into grandeur; Corner Bistro is another kind of institution entirely, the neighbourhood institution. A place for locals and a place to feel like a local. Somewhere to perch at the bar for an hour or two.

It’s been on the corner of West 4th and Jane Street since 1961. It’s former owner, Bill O’Donnell, ran the place for nearly half a century. You can feel that integrity in Corner Bistro. Something of Old New York.

What Grand Central's Oyster Bar, Keen's, and Corner Bistro share is not quality exactly, but indifference to the present tense. They are places that decided what they are are long ago, and don’t need to change. The same could be said for the double breasted jacket, if you want to push it a bit.

The kind of garment that belongs to no particular decade, answers to no particular trend. Wearing one in Midtown, moving between the station's vaulted lower levels, along the hushed corridor of 36th Street, and into the Village as the evening comes in — you can still feel briefly, pleasantly, out of time.