This Manhattan restaurant is a tough reservation to book — because it doesn’t exist.
The foodie gentry who gathered for their dinner at Mehran’s Steakhouse this weekend believed they’d at last gotten off the years-long waitlist for a highly exclusive, 100-year-old chop house, which finally had an available table at its Lower East Side location.
In reality, what some 140 diners experienced this Saturday evening was an elaborate prank pulled off by a 21-year-old AI startup founder — and some 65 of his friends.
The practical joke of a white tablecloth institution was born during the pandemic, in 2021, when Mehran Jalali’s 16 housemates decided to commemorate the biweekly steak dinners he’d cook them by marking their Upper East Side home as a chop house on Google Maps.
The mostly teenage roomies all left glowing reviews for the newfound institution, leading to intrigued strangers showing up at their door seeking steak.
Mehran then made a website for their solidly booked, “revolutionary steak experience” and, by the end of 2022, had accrued a 2,600-person waitlist.
Seeking to make the hoax a reality, he and a crew of co-conspirators recruited friends to compose the volunteer staff, found a venue, got a one-day liquor license, food handling permits, plane tickets to New York (he now lives in San Francisco) and a 212 number to invite select waitlisters to his ephemeral eatery.
For those who attended, the relatively subtle charade was an only-in-New-York stunt to be remembered.
Set in an unmarked public bathhouse-turned-event space on East 11th Street, Mehran’s Steakhouse was not immediately obvious as being a one-night-only joke, although over the course of the night most guests appeared to notice that something was off.
The first clue for the more observant of the crowd lay off the lobby, hanging on a wall en route to the main dining area: A selection of framed photographs depicting chef Mehran posing with an array of celebrities he had ostensibly cooked for over the many, many years. Pictured stars included Albert Einstein, Marilyn Monroe, a group of 1920s mobsters, Obama and JFK.
“I would recommend suspending your understanding of linear time,” Mehran advised when asked about the images.
Further down the wall were a series of large format promotional posters from Mehran’s Steakhouse over the decades, including one advertising “bone marrow ice cream.”
Across the way, a looping black and white projection varyingly showed videos of raw meat cooling off, being salted and in a skillet next to a large half-head of garlic.
As violin covers of pop hits (and at one point the “Curb Your Enthusiasm” theme song) played, one of the ridiculously overstaffed venue’s army of barely-legal servers showed the well-dressed patrons to their seats, where a 15-inch laser-etched wood cut provided them with a comedic amount of text describing their upcoming, $114 prix-fixe meal.
“The bright blissful days, the frigid unforgiving nights, heat, snow, drought, storm, all earthly experiences felt in tandem. Is this not community?” read one high-brow gibberish line from the giant block of text describing the “Agrarian Synergies” course, one of five themed to “the Bovine Circle of Life.”
As part of this meal concept, two suited waiters at one point paraded around a gallon of whole milk as though it were a fine wine.
“The milk is intended to represent the bovine life cycle,” my 21-year-old server, Erika, informed me as a sommelier suppressed a smile and poured me a large glass of it, adding “We felt it would be remiss to not include the cow’s byproducts.”
Another, different waiter later informed me the milk came from a cow in Uganda named Philip.
“Mmm, yes, Philip, a common name for a female cow,” Mehran commented, hands perpetually clasped behind his back, playing a solemn chef as he ambled among tables in a black double-breasted jacket
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