Le Veau d'Or – New York's oldest bistro, reborn

On a quiet stretch of East 60th Street, Le Veau d'Or has been serving French bistro cooking since 1937, long enough to have counted Ernest Hemingway, Marlene Dietrich, Grace Kelly and Jacqueline Onassis among its regulars, and to have earned a four-star review from Craig Claiborne in The New York Times in 1968. The restaurant closed in 2019 after eighty-seven years under only three owning families, then returned in July 2024 under Riad Nasr and Lee Hanson, the chefs behind Frenchette and Le Rock, who had bought it from Catherine Treboux, daughter of longtime owner Robert Treboux. It holds a selection in the MICHELIN Guide. The room still runs on dark wood, checked tablecloths and ruby velvet, the kind of bistro interior New York has largely lost, and the kitchen now works a prix-fixe menu that treats the restaurant's own archive of dishes as source material rather than museum pieces.

01The room and the setting

The address has not changed and, deliberately, nor has the mood. Dark wood panelling, red-and-white checked tablecloths and cherry-red velvet banquettes fill a narrow room where tables sit close together, and the restaurant's long-time signature, a painting of a sleeping calf, still hangs on the wall. A four-seat bar near the entrance pours the house's original apéritif, a cocktail stirred with Dubonnet, kirsch and lemon juice that predates the current owners by decades. Upstairs, in what used to be Cathy Treboux's office, Nasr and Hanson built a twenty-seat private dining room and bar, the one significant addition to a space they otherwise chose to leave largely untouched.

Orson Welles is said to have kept a favourite window banquette here, and the clientele once ran to James Beard himself, a lineage the new owners are conscious of protecting rather than erasing.

02The chefs

Riad Nasr, who trained with Michel Bras in France and helped open Daniel, and Lee Hanson, who started in restaurant kitchens at fourteen working with Daniel Boulud at Le Cirque before cooking under Charlie Palmer at Aureole and Jean-Georges Vongerichten at Vong, built their reputations opening Balthazar and Minetta Tavern alongside Keith McNally, before parting ways with him in 2013. Their own restaurant, Frenchette in Tribeca, won a James Beard Award the year after it opened, and that success is reportedly what prompted Catherine Treboux to finally call the pair, years after they had first approached her about Le Veau d'Or. They bought the restaurant in 2019, added Rockefeller Center's Le Rock to their group, and reopened Le Veau d'Or in July 2024. In June 2025 the James Beard Foundation named Nasr and Hanson Outstanding Restaurateurs, citing their work across Frenchette, Le Rock and Le Veau d'Or.

Insider tip

Prix-fixe menu; reservations recommended given the room's small scale.

03The cooking

The format is the one the restaurant has used for most of its life: a prix-fixe menu, originally built around ten appetisers, ten entrées and five desserts, that leans on the dishes regulars came for decades ago rather than reinventing the room's identity. After the main course a small green salad arrives, unannounced, as a palate reset before dessert, a sequence that is pure old-school bistro grammar. The kitchen's discipline shows in classics such as the golden-roasted poulet à l'estragon, finished with an unapologetically buttery tarragon sauce, and in a pâté en croûte built with the kind of patience few New York kitchens still have time for.

04What to order

Start with the pâté en croûte or the escargots, or go further into the archive with frog legs persillade, sizzling in garlic-parsley butter, or tête de veau ravigote, cubes of jellied veal head in terrine with hard-boiled egg. Sautéed veal liver l'eschalote, seared pink and finished with caramelised shallots and blond raisins, is a dish few New York menus still carry. For the main course, the duck magret aux cerises arrives with rendered, shatter-crisp skin, warm spicing and stewed tart cherries; the hanger steak (onglet) comes with béarnaise or poivre sauce and frites; gigot of lamb is served with herbed coco beans; and poulet à l'estragon and homard macédoine, lobster with salad and fine herbs, round out the list. Finish with île flottante, riz au lait, a warm gratin au chocolat or the apple tart.

05The neighbourhood

Le Veau d'Or sits on the Upper East Side between Park and Lexington Avenues, a few streets from Bloomingdale's and the shops of East 59th and 60th, in a townhouse Robert Treboux bought in 1985. The restaurant opened in 1937, in the years when French chefs and restaurateurs were arriving in New York to work the French Pavilion at the 1939 World's Fair, a wave of interest in French cooking that gave the city several of its defining bistros. Nearly ninety years on, this one is still trading on the same corner.

For a weekend. For a lifetime.