Can a Steakhouse Be Modern?

What do we want from a modern steakhouse? Can a steakhouse even be modern? I wanted to check out just a few, a recent crop. So, Gui takes a Korean approach. There’s a ribeye, dry-aged for 45 days. Prime rib is wet-cured overnight with koji and then given a rub of spices, including shiokombu. So you get some of the flavors of Korean cooking and the meat itself is fired over binchotan Korean charcoal. Some of the surrounding dishes lack the same finesse Like an A5 Wagyu katsu sando that was maybe a little too fatty. La Tête d’Or takes a French perspective, and you can see that in the precision of the cooking of the steaks. Silverdomed prime rib trolleys maneuver through the room, occasionally almost colliding — Midtown traffic. The 34-ounce porterhouse, which costs $260, is cooked perfectly, but the rest of the menu can feel a little fill in the blanks. There’s the requisite steakhouse chocolate cake. Every steakhouse must have one, and perhaps inevitably, the Dubai chocolate soft-serve swirl sundae. Cuerno is the first U.S. outpost of a Mexican restaurant group. It’s the most fun of the three I visited, in part, because it’s not really trying to be an American steakhouse. It’s celebrating the tradition of Northern Mexico — carne asada — which is not just food, but an event. The menu will tell you that the beef is raised on South Dakota’s pristine grasslands, and that gives it a lot of flavor, something of a break from steakhouse tradition. The other dishes are sort of distracting. There are whole heads of cauliflower and broccoli. Usually I disdain this approach, but here they’re actually interesting, full of heat and flavor. It feels generous. It’s a steakhouse that feels like, come in, we will feed you, you will not leave hungry. So the steakhouse is a genre and genres are meant to be played with, sometimes transcended. I’m not sure if any of these places fully managed to do that. Can the steakhouse be modern? I think it’s possible, but I couldn’t help wishing that I’d — I was just back at Keens. You can read my full critic’s notebook at nytimes.com.