One of the Highest New Entries and Best Steak Restaurant in North America 2026

New York history, rewritten through beef

The Eighty Six enters the World’s 101 Best Steak Restaurants 2026 as one of the Highest New Entries - the second-highest new entry - and immediately takes the title of Best Steak Restaurant in North America 2026. It is an arrival of rare confidence, not because it tries to be louder than New York, but because it understands exactly what it wants to be - a restaurant where heritage, precision and modern beef culture meet without compromise.

Tucked away on Bedford Street in the West Village, The Eighty Six occupies the former home of Chumley’s, a Prohibition-era address woven into the city’s cultural memory. The setting is not treated as decoration. It gives the restaurant its cadence: discreet, atmospheric and quietly assured. Even the name carries weight, nodding to the building’s age and to the culinary term “86”, believed to have originated here. The restaurant uses that foundation well, creating a sense of place that feels lived-in rather than staged.

At the centre of the experience is an exceptional beef selection built around provenance and relationships with smaller producers, far removed from the American mainstream. The Eighty Six begins at the source, treating lineage, genetics and how an animal is raised as the starting point of flavour, then choosing cattle for character rather than uniformity. The result reads less like a steak list and more like a clear point of view: single-origin farms, distinct breeds and cuts chosen because they express something specific.

That intent becomes most convincing in the restaurant’s direct relationships. One partnership centres on a small farm in Salem, New Jersey, raising Spanish Vaca Vieja cattle less than 100 miles from New York City. Mature animals of this type are common in Spain but rare in the United States, and the depth they bring is the kind of detail that changes the conversation around what American steak can be. The Eighty Six treats this not as a novelty, but as a serious expression of maturity and origin.

It goes further still with an international sourcing initiative through Westholme Australia, working with retired six-year-old Spanish Vaca Vieja Holsteins crossed with Japanese Wagyu genetics and raised entirely on grass. It is a lineage hardly found elsewhere in the US, designed to combine the intensity of Vaca Vieja with the marbling and tenderness associated with Wagyu. This is not steak as a luxury signal. It is steak as a deliberate outcome of breeding and long-range decision-making.

Below the original bar, a Himalayan salt-lined ageing room holds a rotating selection of these cuts, dry-aged on site, cut in-house and cooked by method rather than by habit - broiler heat, Spanish plancha or Japanese binchōtan charcoal, chosen to suit the character of each steak. That range matters because it respects difference. It does not pretend one technique fits every animal.



As one of the Highest New Entries and the Best Steak Restaurant in North America of 2026, The Eighty Six sets a new standard for what a modern steak restaurant can be in New York: deeply rooted in place, uncompromising in sourcing and mature enough to let the beef do the talking.