The Polo Bar

American classics at the sceniest of Manhattan restaurants.

When you think of perennially hard-to-book New York City restaurants, a few likely come to mind: 4 Charles. Don Angie. Torrisi. The food at these restaurants is, mostly, excellent; hundreds of Resy users vying for a few dozen seats at each of these hot spots each night are not, as a rule, collectively deluded. When it comes to The Polo Bar, the situation is a little different.

I am by no stretch of the imagination immune to hype. The Polo Bar was my white whale: the last impossible NYC reservation, the final boss. I was planning to try to go for my birthday later this fall. I coached my fiancé on how to make the attempt: get on the phone thirty days before at ten am and prepare to wait on hold. Then, on a random evening, I was scrolling on my phone and came upon an orphaned reservation on Beli (my favorite app: the Goodreads of restaurants, and so much more). Laboring under no illusions of certainty that the birthday plan would pan out, I snagged the random table and hoped I would be able to convince my fiancé and another couple to join me there on a Thursday evening. I was lucky.

On East 55th Street, my friend waited for us; I didn’t know she’d be there before us and had failed to mention that my reservation was actually someone named Kendall’s, and so she endured pitying, puzzled glances from the bouncer (yes: this restaurant has an actual bouncer, to keep out riffraff in ripped jeans) as she tried my name and my fiancé’s name to no avail. Once we got in, we were seated in the sleek bar area, where brass drink tables are stationed at chestnut leather banquettes and cocktails are served with a trio of complementary bar snacks that includes potato chips, nuts, and very good fried olives. But we spent barely any time there, having only just ordered our first cocktails when the host swept us away to our table.

The meal consisted of slightly (but not extremely!) elevated American classics: an iceberg wedge salad with tomato, blue cheese, and bacon that was good but not special (for that, go to Peter Luger. Their wedge is, in this reviewer’s humble opinion, excellent and worth the price tag in a way that that institution’s steak is not.) There was a bacon cheeseburger and accompanying cone of fries (for which we had to request mayo). This was good, and it was well-cooked to medium rare. But it was not nearly as delicious as some other New York City steakburgers, like Minetta Tavern’s or Red Hook/Sag Harbor Tavern’s, and if it is indeed Polo Bar’s best dish… well, more on that later. There was a filet mignon that was good but both significantly more expensive and significantly less delicious than the one we had recently tried at The Corner Store, a new Soho spot that has a Polo Bar-like menu and ambiance, but trendier.

There was also an impossibly elaborate martini, which you can order with several different varieties of top-shelf gin and vodka. There were pigs in a blanket that somehow seemed fancy, despite the fact that you can probably find ones of equal quality on any given friend’s coffee table during the Super Bowl. There was a cut up, pressed corned beef sandwich we did not order, presented to us compliments of the chef — apparently one of the most well-loved menu items, it was in my estimation nothing remarkable. (You can get a much larger, much better, and much less goyish corned beef and Swiss affair from Katz’s for less money. Although the all-American preppy icon Ralph Lauren was in fact born with the decidedly not goyish name of Ralph Lifshitz… but I digress.)

You can’t go to Polo Bar and not have an absurdly sized dessert. The four of us shared a slice of chocolate layer cake and a slice of coconut cake. The chocolate cake, which may have been the best thing I ate that night, was moist and fudgy in the best way, reminiscent of my favorite childhood birthday cakes and served with a dollop of whipped cream that both cut and enhanced the richness in that way that only whipped cream on a chocolate dessert can do. The coconut cake came with a quenelle of passion fruit sorbet with a mint leaf perched on it in a whimsical attempt to mimic a lemon; for me, the passion fruit (and the presentation) elevated what would have been a mediocre and slightly dry dessert.

The dessert, however, arrived with an additional surprise: the server proffered the plate of coconut cake, adorned with a lit candle and decorated with a chocolate sauce inscription we couldn’t make out at first, as he eagerly waited to bestow it on the lucky diner whose birthday it was. You see, Kendall had neglected to mention, during the passing of the baton via text that Beli’s reservation exchange entails, that the reservation was to celebrate his/her/their birthday! And that they had clearly made this known in their booking! Wanting to avoid any awkwardness, I snapped out of my bemused trance and improvised, answering the server’s question of “so whose birthday is it?” with “his!” and pointing to my fiancé, Nathaniel: “Happy Birthday, Kendall! Wow, I totally forgot we were celebrating!”

At The Polo Bar, you can wear a dinner jacket, if you’re into that. You can order four different kinds of beef that all taste different. You can people watch and imagine what the other patrons’ lives are like. You can sip a $60 dirty martini that literally comes on a silver platter with oysters and caviar. It all tastes like money. It’s fun, to a degree. I enjoyed dressing up (it’s part of an iconic American fashion brand, after all). I enjoyed sitting in an oak paneled room with forest green tartan upholstery that resembled my all-girls prep school uniform skirt. I enjoyed looking at hundreds of paintings and photographs of horses. But was the meal, and specifically the food itself, so good it was worth pretending to be someone named Kendall? Not really. But hey — it makes for a good story.

TL;DR: WHAT WE ATE

Loved: nothing

Liked: chocolate cake, Polo Burger, pigs in a blanket, filet, wedge salad

Should have skipped: coconut cake, corned beef sandwich

The Polo Bar

1 E 55th St

New York, NY 10022