Restaurant Week Takes Midtown & Downtown— for 23 Days!
Time again to strap on the ol’ feed bag and feast on the prix fixe menus at hundreds of fine city restaurants, including these glories of midtown and downtown gastronomy.
Downtown /
| 19 Jan 2026 | 02:02
A Restaurant Week jewel in Battery Park City: Treadwell Park (
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Nick + Stefs, a restaurant week destination at 8th Ave and 33rd Street, forget “Penn Plaza” numbers. (
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What’s big, brassy, beauteous and a no-holds-barred invitation to strap on the ol’ feedbag? That’s right, gastronauts and gastronettes, it’s Restaurant Week—the winter edition—23 days long and everyone of them a potential winner, even if there’s no established unit of time to cover its actual duration midtown, downtown and all its consituent neighborhoods.
No matter its fanciful branding, the facts are as follows: from Tuesday January 20 (the birthday of George Burns, nee Nathan Birnbaum, of the Lower East Side) through February 12 (the birthday of Abraham Lincoln, whose February 27, 1860 speech at Cooper Union boosted the Illinoisan into a presidential frontrunner) more than 600 participating hash slingers—more than 500 in Manhattan—are offering special “prix fixe” menus at $30, $45 and $60 price tiers.
That moolah covers two or three courses, though expect to pay more with drinks and tips. Also, while these menus generally cultivate a reduced version of any given restaurant’s offerings, they represent both a relative bargain and a chance to explore venues and cuisines that might otherwise be elusive.
Following is a highly selective guide to some of the local gems of Restaurant Week.
Nick + Stef Steakhouse
9 Penn Plaza
212-563-4444
If you work or commute anywhere near Macy’s Herald Square or the NYPD Midtown South Precinct, you’ve likely passed it a jillion times: Nick + Stef Steakhouse. But where exactly are you? Its official address, 9 Penn Plaza isn’t that helpful. Isn’t this all Penn Plaza: the train station, Madison Square Garden, and the mryiad open spaces between its confusingly named buildings? Remember this, for beyond the endless MTA real estate stories, redevelopment this and reconstruction that (not to mention MayorAdams’ Dallas Penn Day Proclamation), there are real people here. Two of these people are Nick and Stef, and even though they might be fictional (their origin story is murky), their home—a midtown meat lover’s joy—is at 8th Avenue and 33rd Street, adjacent the World’s Most Famous Sporting Arena. Pick Hits for Restaurant Week: Butternut Squad Soup with pumpkin seeds, sage, oil and Flat Iron Steak with salsde verd and French fries. At other times, as the old Cole Porter song had it, anything goes.
Treadwell Park
301 South End Ave.
212-945-0528
There’s an incredible Charlie “Bird” Parker tune called “An Oscar for Treadwell.” He recorded it in 1949 with his partner in the bebop revolution Dizzy Gillespie. Thelonious Monk, of San Juan Hill, plays piano. Many jazz physicians advise that if one listen to this record at least once a day, a long and prosperous life will follow. Bird, beset by bad health and addiction, sadly died young, of course but the man the named for, jazz radio DJ Oscar Treadwell, lived to be 79. While this food reporter can’t make any promises what fortune a meal at Treadwell Park might be bring, it’s likely to be good, for the elation alone one feels just seeing Treadwell Park joyously adorned edifice in Battery Park City reason enough to praise them. Head inside, and things are even more exciting, like the sports bar / beer hall of your dreams: Go Knicks! Go Liberty! Go Dawgs! Go Hearts! (Scottish Premiership football) with none of the nightmare sidelines that often accompany that Go Team! set. Pick Restaurant Week Hit for Bundesliga fans: Rahm Schnitzel (Veal cutlet, citrus creamy mushroom sauce, German bacon potato salad).
Industry Kitchen
70 South St.
212-487-9600
Though there are many reasons to venture to South Street, from the seaport to the ferry to the Tin Building to the putative subject of this celebration, the mighty Industry Kitchen, there is one greatest movie of all time about the locale and its name is “Pickup on South Street.” Written and directed by lower Manhattanite Sam Fuller (see his also raucous newspaper biz picture “Park Row, “Pickup,” released in May 1953, is the ulimate Cold War New York spy film. Every element of every scene oozes fish guts, ice, subway turnstiles, spies and mob guys and the cacophonous lies lies lies of multiplicity. Richard Widmark as Skip McCoy is Holy. Thelma Ritter as Moe Williams is Holy. The Restaurant Week menu at Industry Kitchen doesn’t come in microfilm but if it did, it would be Holy too. Pick Hit: Blood Orange Glazed Atlantic Salmon with horseradish mashed potatoes, roasted root vegetables, beet and blood orange sauce.
Cull and Pistol
75 9th Ave.
646-568-1223
What kind of name is cull and pistol? This food reporter once worked in the produce department of a major regional grocery chain. Work began at 6 a.m. and when he wasn’t unloading boxes of produce from trucks and bringing them into the freezer room, he was culling fruit and vegetables: broccoli, strawberries, kale, grapefruits, more. His reward was free fresh orange juice or a pineapple ginger drink whose name he can’t recall. So to see an oyster bar in Chelsea Market represent the Art of the Cull, as Jim Carroll exclaimed, “I Salute You Brother!” As for the pistol part, people used shoot clams and oysters and other bivalves on the shores of Greater Gotham. Would they do so today? Doubtful, for whatever your seafood passion, Cull and Pistol has got you covered. Pick Hits: Pistols on Horseback (fried oysters wrapped in jamón ibérico, herb crêpe, pickled red onion, smoked aioli); Grilled Spanish Octopus (Butter beans, chorizo, roasted red pepper, sofrito).