Tao Goes Meat and Potatoes

“Spirited or unspirited?” is the first question posed at Crane Club, the banquet-hall-size restaurant that arose from the ashes of Del Posto. The choice of complimentary opening mock- or cocktail — the nights I went, a Mott’s-y combination of apple brandy, juice, sochu, and hojicha — is up to you, but isn’t the whole point of going out to have a spirited evening? Crane Club wants to offer you a good time, by force if necessary.

This is the newest restaurant from Tao Group Hospitality, which for 25 years has spawned megarestaurants around the globe. The namesake Tao (the uptown location opened in 2000 before the company expanded to Vegas, London, Singapore, and Dubai), with its gigantic Buddha statue and trendy Asian-fusion bites, helped set the tone for the dawn of the clubstaurant era. “Everyone was there — everyone,” said none other than Carrie Bradshaw, who attended the restaurant’s opening on Sex and the City.

These days, the “club” in clubstaurant is more likely to mean a members’ association than a DJ-booth danceteria. With restaurants like these opening up in the city at an alarming rate — most recently, Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s Chez Margaux — Crane Club has it both ways, the aspect of exclusivity without the asperity. There is an application-only private club, in the former cocktail lounge in the basement, but behind the doorman, past the reception desk and the giant canvas of a rosebud bursting into flames, Crane Club is surprisingly broachable. Its opening drew Bethenny Frankel and Bill Maher, but reservations in the cavernous main room are, as of now, in ample-enough supply.

That dining room — separate from the mezzanine-level private rooms, basement club, and front bar — is sequestered from Tenth Avenue, nearly windowless and plush. It offers casual comfort to its crowd, radio-rap on the soundtrack, and hivelike status light fixtures overhead, but during a few visits around the holidays, I failed to piece together who Crane Club’s target audience actually is. One brave soul at a nearby table had brought a young kid; a tanned couple at another seemed to be celebrating an engagement or the promise of one. (“We do weddings,” the server confided, before correcting himself: “We haven’t done one — but we will.”) It courts less a profile than a tax bracket. Hence the bells and whistles familiar to these ritzy carnivals: the stilt-tall verticals of Bordeaux and Barolo on the wine list; the icy pushcart of raw bar that wheels to your table with oysters, lobster, razor clams, and shrimp cocktail; a menu section of single-serve Osetra. (I preferred a $17 white-truffle arancino to a $23 square of savory sfogliatelle with caviar.)

Running the kitchen is Melissa Rodriguez, who has long reigned here: She was the executive chef of Del Posto, after Mark Ladner left, then of its Michelin-starred follow-up, Al Coro. Those were pasta palaces, but in its Tao Group revival, Crane Club is more meat and potatoes all’Italiana. There are three pastas on the menu — stuffed shells with truffled chicken jus were the right side of too much — but the real focus is big-ticket proteins, most of them cooked on the restaurant’s imported Spanish Mibrasa grill, whose belly-ful of cherrywood and hickory gives everything a happy crust of char. Pride costs, of course. Of the five steaks on the permanent menu, the most affordable is a $49 flank, the largest climbing up to $275 for three-plus pounds of porterhouse (a quartet of optional sauces and condiments is not included in that price). For my money, the one to get is among the smallest: Parmesan-aged strip, a detonation of umami.

Is it snitty to wish for something more? You could hardly ask for more space, more yardage of fluttering drapes, more velvet to line your banquettes. But Crane Club indeed left me wishing for more daring to match the bravado. Though my dinners ranked, easily, among the most expensive meals I had last year, in memory they melted back into the mass of many others, chummy clubhouses for a modestly tweaked martini (here, pink with pickled-beet brine or slick with sake and cucumber), a cut of beef, and a throwback dessert (a housemade Viennetta, the ’80s ice-cream cake). Crane Club is good enough, but is “good enough” good enough? Maybe it doesn’t matter: The optics is all. Walking out, I caught a snatch of chortled conversation among a few diners lingering outside. “We can tell Annie you’re flying commercial back,” cracked a dude in a knit beanie. Dispiriting stuff. At least Tao offers the promise of enlightenment.