{"id":12428,"date":"2025-10-22T19:53:25","date_gmt":"2025-10-22T19:53:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/12428\/"},"modified":"2025-10-22T19:53:25","modified_gmt":"2025-10-22T19:53:25","slug":"nyc-mexican-restaurant-cuerno-serves-the-best-steak-in-midtown","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/12428\/","title":{"rendered":"NYC Mexican Restaurant Cuerno Serves the Best Steak in Midtown"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Midtown, Cuerno<\/a>, the new Mexican restaurant<\/a> that opened in June, is a thrilling experience: part restaurant, part dinner theater, and part shrine to steak, all wrapped up in a high-energy, tequila-soaked bow. If you\u2019re having a bad day, this place will fix you up just fine.<\/p>\n

Cuerno is the first U.S. restaurant from Alberto Mart\u00ednez and Victor Seti\u00e9n, founders of the Coste\u00f1o Group<\/a>, which runs over 50 high-end restaurants and more than 10 concepts across Mexico and Spain. This specific spot bills itself as a \u201cvibrant Mexican steakhouse,\u201d and the title tracks. The menu is full of richly marbled cuts of beef sourced from Demkota Ranch Beef<\/a>, a network of small family ranches across the pristine grasslands of South Dakota. At the restaurant, the beef is aged for 24 days; when ordered, it\u2019s given a generous shake of flaky Colima sea salt and ground black pepper, and then seared over a Josper charcoal grill, the kitchen\u2019s beating heart. This oven is a sort of magician, giving whatever enters its fire-breathing mouth \u2014 steak, fish, vegetables \u2014 a beautifully caramelized crust which acts like a robe, sealing in all the juices. There may not be a reason to eat steak anywhere else.<\/p>\n

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The Coraz\u00f3n de Filete at Cuerno. Sofia Barraso\/Cuerno<\/p>\n

From the street, Cuerno, which is located on the ground floor of the Time Life Building, seems like a ho-hum law firm or dull accounting office. But step inside and through the looking glass, and you\u2019re thrown into another world where there\u2019s nothing but a huge party. The room is exuberant, full of guitar-forward Mexican music, the electricity of tequila in the glass, and steaks on fire. Carts roam the aisles, where servers carve Flintstone-sized tomahawk steaks and margaritas are shaken and poured into fat glasses with chile-crusted rims, giving the place a buzzing energy that feels far away from the stuffy halls of Midtown.<\/p>\n

Designed by Mexican architecture firm A de Arquitectos<\/a>, the restaurant has the feel of an open-air hacienda on a warm night, with vaulted ceilings and exposed brick. The hand-carved woodwork frames a striking central ceramic tile mural by Saltillo-based artist Federico Jord\u00e1n, featuring a smiling skeleton in a cobalt-blue hat riding a bull, tipping his hat in a gesture of welcome.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a><\/p>\n

The dining room at Cuerno. Sofia Barraso\/Cuerno<\/p>\n

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The salsas at Cuerno. Sofia Barraso\/Cuerno<\/p>\n

Cuerno\u2019s dinner is a feast that begins with a buffet of house-made salsas. This includes one served warm in a mini molcajete, with a fresh combination of smoky tomato and garlic that\u2019s easy to spoon over anything, from the long, thin shards of freshly fried tortillas to steaks and fish. There are four others, from a mild macha to the spicy zippy jalape\u00f1o, and the hottest of them all, the piquin limon. The complimentary refillable condiments are served with a little booklet, so you can keep that on hand, if, like me, your brain is just not able to contain all that information at once.<\/p>\n

Start with guacamole ($19), creamy avocado from Michoacan that\u2019s kicked up with lime, cilantro, tomatoes, onions, serrano peppers, and a puddle of chile-forward salsa pasilla. We loved the thinly-sliced Japanese hamachi crudo ($24), which is adorned with an aguachile flavor bomb of chile chiltep\u00edn and salsa rasurada. The latter is a sauce stemming from Mexico\u2019s Pacific coast and takes its name from the Mexican word for \u201cshaved,\u201d a nod to its finely shaved vegetables (in this case, red onions, cilantro, scallions, and radishes), which lend a mix of spicy, salty, and acidic flavors to the glossy fish. There\u2019s a cauliflower starter ($21) that doesn\u2019t work \u2014 it\u2019s a mash-up of truffles, mayo, cheese, and pistachios that\u2019s overwrought \u2014 skip it.<\/p>\n

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The hamachi crudo at Cuerno Sofia Barraso\/Cuerno<\/p>\n

The food magic comes from the steaks, of which chef Oriol Mendivil offers six choices. The largest is a 52-ounce salt-crusted tomahawk ($175), the smallest (and just as delicious) is an eight-ounce filet mignon ($55), and, in between, there are 16- and 28-ounce rib-eyes prepared with your choice of salt crust or in a norte\u00f1o-style with pepper, garlic, bone marrow, and spicy salsa piqu\u00edn. There are no wrong answers here.<\/p>\n

But don\u2019t fill up completely, because you cannot miss the tacos. In particular, the Taco Taquero ($38) is served tableside from carts run by suited servers in white caps who brandish blades to dice up glistening slabs of salt-charred skirt steak, scraping the unctuous, buttery marrow from canoe-sized bones and adding a bit of piquin limon salsa and a pinch of fleur de sel. They spoon the marvelous mixture into warm, soft corn tortillas meant to be quickly devoured. While not served with as much ceremony, the Tacos Richi ($12) are also excellent, where the tortillas get a grilled cheese crust and are then filled with thinly sliced rib-eye, a salsa verde, chicharron, and slices of ripe avocado.<\/p>\n

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The Taco Richi at Cuerno. Courtesy of Costen\u0303o Group<\/p>\n

The bar, as you might imagine, leans heavily on tequilas \u2014 margaritas in flavors like classic, tamarind, and pineapple. But this is why I was so disappointed in the Cuerno margarita ($21), which was all one-note sweetness with no tartness or balance; I could not drink it. It\u2019s better to go with the mezcalita ($20), which counters the cloying sweetness with smoke. The wine list has some impressive Mexican and French producers, but it is not priced well. There are only a handful of bottles under $100, with most hovering at or above the $200 price point.<\/p>\n

Cuerno\u2019s desserts are terrific, and while I\u2019d eaten enough food, I had no trouble polishing off the pastel de campechanas ($24), a vanilla ice cream cake layered with crispy caramel-coated Mexican puff pastry (campechana), and topped with pecans and dulce de leche. Sorry, folks; Carvel is done in my book.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In Midtown, Cuerno, the new Mexican restaurant that opened in June, is a thrilling experience: part restaurant, part…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":12429,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[2372,9,24,55,54,56,3942],"class_list":{"0":"post-12428","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york-city","8":"tag-dining-out-in-ny","9":"tag-new-york","10":"tag-new-york-city","11":"tag-new-york-city-headlines","12":"tag-new-york-city-news","13":"tag-ny","14":"tag-scene-report"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12428","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12428"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12428\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12429"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12428"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12428"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12428"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}