THE OLD LUCKY STRIKE REOPENED ON $4 MILLION AND A TWO MILLION FOLLOWER DEPOSIT

For 31 years, 59 Grand Street was the cheap seat in Keith McNally's SoHo. Lucky Strike opened in 1989, a bistro with a copper bar, tiny tables crowded together in the front, Depeche Mode on the speakers, and a martini poured so tall The Infatuation measured it at a martini and a half. It closed on April 15, 2020, a month into lockdown. On October 10, 2026, the same address reopened as Straker's, Thomas Straker's first restaurant outside London, from a chef more than two million people follow on Instagram and TikTok. Air Mail says he spent $4 million getting there. The walls now carry Keith Haring, Damien Hirst and Brian Clarke. The mussel flatbread is $23. On the last menu Lucky Strike posted, the steak frites was $28.50 at lunch.

McNally opened Lucky Strike in 1989 and worked the first seven nights as its DJ. He said so in the post that closed it. The place was never the famous one. The Infatuation called it the lesser known of his restaurants, a name a stranger might take for a bowling alley, and meant it kindly: steak frites that was exactly what you expected, onion soup for cold nights, salmon with green beans and mashed potato, a burger on a thick, untoasted English muffin, and every table with a drink on it early on a Monday. You could linger in the back with a group until 2:30 on a Saturday. Frieze ran an essay the week it closed by Alissa Bennett: nights at the window table with the artists Sam McKinniss and Leigh Ledare, overflowing cocktails, a steak she ordered and did not eat.

McNally had just come out of eight days in the hospital with the virus when he posted, on April 15, 2020, that he had closed Lucky Strike for good after 31 years. The reason, in his words: "Greedy landlord during lockdown syndrome." He did not name the landlord, and no report since has. The staff were left with a GoFundMe.

What happened next at 59 Grand Street is the part nobody has written down. Time Out, when it broke the Straker news in April 2025, said the space had been dormant since Lucky Strike closed. Five years dark at West Broadway, in a neighborhood where brokers quote rent by the square foot. A landlord willing to carry a vacant SoHo storefront through 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024 is waiting for a particular kind of tenant. The one who finally came was an audience.

Straker announced it on Instagram on April 21, 2025: after months of negotiations, he had the keys to the old Lucky Strike. He told Time Out he had heard so many stories about people spending hours there and meant to do the space justice. He did not say what the rent is, how long the lease runs, or who signed the other side of it. None of that has surfaced since. Eater, cited by Hoodline, said the opening was first set for late September; it landed on October 10, roughly eighteen months after the keys.

The $4 million figure comes from Air Mail, which published a profile of Straker on October 17 under the headline Churning Up SoHo. The body is paywalled; the figure sits in the page's own description, the line that says the chef "has spent $4 million opening a restaurant in McNally's former SoHo space." Straker, talking to Cultured a day before opening, put it more lightly: the project had a slightly bigger budget, so he bought bespoke speakers.

Post Company, the design studio run by Ruben Caldwell, Jou-Yie Chou and Leigh Salem, did the room. By Cultured's and Haute Living's accounts, the wood ceiling and floor stayed. Everything else is new: a steel-clad open kitchen with green stone counters, a marble bar in a slightly different green from the London one, low leather banquettes facing the cooks, counter seats, a back dining room with white tablecloths, bathrooms wrapped floor to ceiling in marble and mirror. The art is the tell. Keith Haring, Damien Hirst, Brian Clarke and Jake Clark hang through the room; Haute Living's photographer caught a shark sketch. Lucky Strike fed SoHo's artists at tiny tables. Straker's hangs the artists SoHo's galleries sold.

The man himself is 37 by Cultured's count and 36 by Air Mail's, born in the United States, raised on a farm in Herefordshire, in kitchens since he was 18: the Dorchester, then Dinner by Heston Blumenthal, then Casa Cruz. The fame came later and came from butter. His All Things Butter videos turned into a dairy brand sold in more than 15,000 stores in Britain and the Emirates, and into a following that Cultured, Time Out and Restaurant magazine all put above two million across Instagram and TikTok. Hoodline says 2.7 million. He runs Straker's in Notting Hill and Acre on Golborne Road, told Time Out in April 2025 that New Yorkers are super discerning, and told Cultured this month that McNally has become a friend and will remain one.

Here is the answer to the question on the last slide. Straker's posted its menu at strakers.nyc; we read it on October 21. Lucky Strike's last menu survives in a SinglePlatform cache, undated, lunch and dinner prices a dollar or two apart: how a bistro that closed in April 2020 priced its final year.

Straker's, October 2026. Mussel flatbread with chilli butter, the London signature: $23. Girolles flatbread with taleggio and basil: $24. Lucky Lime oysters, the single dish named for the old tenant: $30 or $55, the menu does not say for how many. Red shrimp and foie gras tostada: $16. Bluefin tuna belly carpaccio: $30. Langoustines with gremolata and brown butter: $36. Agnolotti with ricotta and burnt tomato butter: $28. Tagliolini with clams, garlic and chilli: $32. Wood-roasted grouper with salsa verde: $45. Wood-roasted Dover sole: $88. Grilled half chicken: $38. Grilled strip steak with beef sauce: $77. Grilled T-bone: $125. Sides, $12 to $14.

Lucky Strike, its last posted menu. Mussels: $15, fries $4.50 more. French onion soup: $9.50 at lunch, $10.50 at dinner. A flatbread with tomato, basil, olives and mozzarella: $14. Croque monsieur: $16. Hamburger: $17 at lunch, $18 at dinner. Salade niçoise: $23. Poulet rôti with smoked bacon, mushrooms and pearl onions: $25. Grilled salmon: $23.50 at lunch, $26 at dinner. Steak frites: $28.50 at lunch, $30.50 at dinner. A strip steak au poivre: $34.50. Fries: $8.50. Every dessert $10, the sticky toffee pudding credited to Schiller's and the cheesecake to Balthazar. Signature cocktails $14.

So the steak at this address went from $30.50 to $77, the top cut from a $34.50 strip au poivre to a $125 T-bone, the flatbread from $14 to $23. Inflation since 2020 gets you part of the way. The audience gets you the rest, because the audience is what the new menu was built to sell to.

Lucky Strike worked because it was cheap for SoHo and open until 2:30 and nobody needed to know who was cooking. The address earned its regulars one night at a time, over 31 years, and the regulars were the neighborhood: the painters, the writers, the people who still lived upstairs from the galleries. Straker's arrives with the regulars already counted, more than two million of them, on their phones, before the first grouper came off the wood oven. That is the deal a landlord who sat on a dark corner for five years was waiting for. A chef with a following does not need the block to find him. The block needs him to post from it. The audience is the deposit. The art on the wall is the security. The neighborhood that spent 31 years at the tiny tables is the backdrop in the photo.

Straker told Cultured he wants it to be the kind of place where you come at 8 or 9. Lucky Strike was the kind of place where you stayed until 2:30. Both can be true of a dining room. Only the first survives a $77 steak. In 2026 the audience is the deposit, and the neighborhood is the backdrop.

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