Minetta Tavern

On our list of the best special-occasion restaurants in New York.

A speakeasy and later an Italian restaurant occupied this MacDougal Street corner before it became Minetta Tavern in 1937, and its walls still carry caricatures of regulars from its years as a hangout for Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound and other Greenwich Village writers. Keith McNally took the space over in 2009 and reworked it into a French bistro built around a Parisian steakhouse sensibility. The Black Label Burger, a blend of dry-aged cuts on Balthazar bakery brioche, has become the dish people cross the Village for. The dining room stays loud and packed most nights, closer to a clubby town square than a quiet retreat.