Bringing Peter Luger Home  | The New Yorker

"The Brooklyn restaurant’s iconic wedge salad, dry-aged porterhouse, and beautiful burger pack up surprisingly well. In his new biography of Mike Nichols, the critic Mark Harris details how, a few months into shooting Tony Kushner’s 'Angels in America,' for HBO, the production fell behind schedule and Nichols’s 'spirits started to flag.' What would cheer him up? 'Most often, the answer was food,' Harris writes. Nichols’s then assistant would 'go to Peter Luger’s every day to get him and the cast burgers for lunch.' [...] Opening a plastic-and-aluminum deli container to find the iconic wedge salad was like seeing an old friend: the refreshing crunch of tightly coiled ruffles of iceberg, the surprisingly juicy chopped tomato, the chunky blue-cheese dressing, the unmistakable, thick-cut, heart-clogging bacon. I was similarly exhilarated by the creamed spinach, the fried potatoes, and the chocolate mousse, with its enormous dollop of schlag (suspiciously if delightfully reminiscent of Cool Whip). It wasn’t so much that any of the dishes stood out on their own—although I did note, as ever, how easily a knife slid through rosy slices of the dry-aged porterhouse—as it was that they shouted 'steak house' loud and clear, making for a combination that I would never replicate on my own and that brings me the coziest pleasure. One of my favorite parts of my earliest Peter Luger visits was when an inevitably brusque yet joke-cracking veteran waiter would toss a handful of gold chocolate coins on the table with the check. In a paper bag of condiments, I found my beloved foil-wrapped disks." - Hannah Goldfield