For New Yorkers who have long dreamed of eating at Buenos Aires’s legendary Don Julio without booking a 10-hour flight, that trip just got a lot shorter.
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Graciela, the first U.S. restaurant from acclaimed Argentine restaurateur Pablo Rivero, opened Tuesday in the West Village, bringing the chef’s famed live-fire cooking to the corner of Greenwich Avenue and Bank Street. It’s Rivero’s first restaurant outside Argentina, where his Michelin-starred Don Julio is now one of the world’s most decorated steakhouses, earning a place on The World’s 50 Best Restaurants list and attracting everyone from devoted food travelers to Lionel Messi.
But don’t mistake Graciela for just another steakhouse. Named after Rivero’s mother, the 120-seat restaurant draws inspiration from Argentine bodegón, the neighborhood taverns that mix Italian and Spanish influences with Argentina’s culinary traditions. The menu has no shortage of expertly grilled beef, but there are also plenty of vegetables, seafood, and housemade charcuterie.
The restaurant’s centerpiece is a custom Argentine parrilla and Spanish Josper oven stretching more than 10 feet across one side of the dining room. The grill, believed to be among the largest in New York City, burns imported quebracho blanco charcoal from Argentina.
From that fire come signature dishes including Argentine ribeye, skirt steak, short ribs and New York strip milanesa, alongside grilled branzino, roasted vegetables and traditional fare such as osso buco empanadas, fainá (a chickpea flatbread) and charred eggplant dip. Housemade gelato in flavors including dulce de leche and pistachio rounds out the menu.
Chef de cuisine Victoria DeGiorgio, who spent more than five years working alongside Rivero in Buenos Aires, leads the kitchen, while culinary director Jason Pfeifer brings experience from Per Se, Gramercy Tavern and Maialino. Rivero has also relocated members of his longtime front-of-house team (including Don Julio’s grill master) to help recreate the hospitality that has become as much a calling card as the food itself.
“The unique star of asado is the parrillero,” Rivero recently told Grub Street. “He needs to be in the center and to be seen because he is cooking for someone. He is not an anonymous cook in the kitchen.”
That emphasis on generosity carries throughout the restaurant. Rivero has often said the meal itself is only part of the experience, telling Grub Street: “The food is not important. What is important is what we can make our guests to feel better. The cuisine is only a pretext.”
The space itself, designed by Home Studios, features reclaimed-wood ceilings, vintage furnishings, and stone surfaces to create the feeling of a warm, old-world tavern. (Later this year, the team plans to open a vaulted cellar space beneath the dining room inspired by the building’s apothecary past and Argentina’s botanical traditions.)
For New York’s steakhouse scene, Graciela arrives with a serious pedigree. But if Rivero has his way, it will be remembered less as a destination for special occasions and more as the kind of neighborhood restaurant people return to again and again.
