Lucky's Soho

If you order the Lucky’s Martini Service, your dinner at this small but swanky Soho spot is bound to begin with a bang. It’ll cost you an extra $6 per martini, but when a group of smiling servers in vests approach your table and shake your group’s martinis in unison, it feels vaguely worth it. Things go downhill from there.

No amount of martini-drinking, candlelight, or leather booths can make up for the food at this California chain steakhouse import. The signature salad is reminiscent of a bad day at the salad bar. The steak sauces are watery and lifeless. The sides are sometimes over-seasoned, sometimes under-seasoned, but dependable misses. And the $150 porterhouse is tough, dry, small, and overcooked.

You could consider coming here for a drink at the black marble bar, if you really can’t get one anywhere else . But then you’d run the risk of drinking one too-many tableside martinis (not because they’re that good, more for the show), and then make the mistake of ordering food.

Food Rundown

Jumbo Shrimp Cocktail

The least offensive dish on the menu. The shrimp are adequately cooked, the cocktail sauce is classic.

Lucky’s Salad

When a menu item is named after the restaurant, you expect a lot out of it. That’s just human nature. Resist the urge when it comes to this salad. The toppings sound good on paper, but the dressing is tasteless. It's like Sweetgreen, on a bad day. It’ll make you wish you had ordered the wedge or the caesar, except who's to say those would be any better.

Thick Cut Cajun Bacon

Two half-inch-thick slices of bacon in a vaguely sweet glaze. Delicious for about three bites.

Porterhouse

A few hours after ingesting this $150 porterhouse, we received a message from our dining partner: “Ok now that we’re not in a small room where the staff can hear us, that steak was one of the worst steaks I’ve had in New York.” Obviously a bold claim, but when a steak is so overcooked that nobody bothers having the last piece, it’s got to mean something. Our “medium-rare” was so dry that even the solid amount of salt present on the exterior couldn’t break it out of steak jail.

Sauces

The saving grace of a bad steak can be its sauces, because when you spend a fortune on red meat it feels wrong to just leave it untouched. That is not the case with the sauces here. We tried three—the béarnaise, the red wine and shallot, and the peppercorn cream—and all three were under-seasoned and watery.

Creamed Spinach

Extremely undersalted.

Mashed Potatoes

Extremely oversalted.