Amy Francisco works on the “Mehran’s Steak House” dessert course — angel’s and devil’s food cakes — during the single night of the much-hyped restaurant’s existence in New York City on Sept. 23, 2023.
Mathurah Ravigulan/@memoriesbymathuNew Yorkers, it seems, will clamor to get reservations at a buzzy restaurant — even if it doesn’t actually exist.
A group of Bay Area techies just put the finishing touch on an inside joke more than a year in the making: They threw together an elaborate one-night restaurant in Manhattan that was attended by over 100 of the city’s spendier diners on Saturday, Sept. 23. The fake “steakhouse” started out as a goofy Google Maps posting but ended up a veritable fine-dining experience, with hints that Gen Z technophiles were involved all along the way.
Mehran Jalali, Riley Walz and Danielle Egan, all of whom now live in the Bay Area and work in tech, ran the now-viral scheme. The young transplants were staying in a townhouse of tech and art workers in Manhattan in 2021 when Jalali — who “makes a mean steak,” Egan told SFGATE — took over the home’s biweekly group dinner.
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As a joke, Egan listed the address as “Mehran’s Steak House” on Google Maps around the time she moved back to the Bay Area in 2022.
Then the gag gained steam. Pals in on the joke tried to one-up each other with praise on the listing’s review section, Egan said. “I don’t think I can even look at meat again without having flashbacks of my experience here,” one wrote. Another: “Chef Mehran is a genius-god among men.”
In March, a local couple arrived, looking for a meal. The housemates turned them away, but Walz sprang up a website for the nonexistent business. Its “reservations required” and “fully booked for the next six months” messages played well to the city of lengthy waitlists — 900 parties signed up for reservations from May 2022 to September 2023, according to a social media post by Jalali on Tuesday. “Classic upper east side steakhouse-going crowd: lawyers, bankers, artists, etc.,” he wrote.
Danielle Egan designed the menu for the night, which was then laser-cut onto wooden discs.
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A local journalist, Anne Kadet, dug into the mystery on her Substack in May 2023. “I’m convinced that Mehran’s Steak House is a total fiction,” she wrote. “But that just begs the question — who would bother to construct such an elaborate online prank, and why?”
The attention spurred the pals into action, Egan said, and after more than a year of hype, they decided to try to actually create the restaurant as a pop-up. Egan said she didn’t see it as a prank but as a broadening of the pals’ digital gag — she wanted to make it “insane, bizarre, but delightful.”
Jalali and Walz were living in San Francisco and working on an artificial intelligence startup at this point, but preparations for the New York pop-up began. They found a venue and got the necessary permits to cook food and serve wine, Egan said. In August, they called people from the waitlist; 140 made reservations. To staff the effort, the trio called together about 60 similarly aged friends with little restaurant experience to volunteer with setting up, cooking and cleaning — and infusing the entire dining experience with hints of the absurd.
Organizers set up a live feed of the dining area, which had been hastily arranged in the empty Manhattan event space.
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The restaurant novices managed to whip up a five-course menu, toasting Trader Joe’s bread with a convection oven and searing over 100 pounds of steak (they found the butcher on Reddit). A young “sommelier” struggled to open wine bottles tableside. On the walls, frames held Photoshopped images of the 21-year-old Jalali with long-dead celebrities, along with posters of nonexistent prior menus. Organizers rigged a fake marriage proposal and had imitation Drake fans stand outside with handmade posters. The rapper was not in attendance, but New York Times food writer Becky Hughes made it in — “On Saturday night, I got the toughest dinner reservation in New York,” she told TikTok
Several videos from the night went viral on social media, and outlets around the world have picked up the story. Egan said her night was made when a diner asked to buy one of the strange, circular menus she’d designed. Feedback, she added, was overwhelmingly positive, though a couple of people asked not to pay, and one party dined and dashed after eating all five courses. The menu ran at $114 before tax, tip and wine; Egan said the organizers lost a “little bit” of money overall (the massive volunteer force helped) and gained a lot of respect for the restaurant industry.
Volunteers drummed up hype outside the event space, pretending that superstar rapper Drake was dining inside.
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She said she, Jalali and Walz are hoping to bring some of their whimsical and organizational know-how to the Bay Area, but don’t bother digging around in San Francisco’s Google Maps listings to find another faux restaurant.
“We wanna find something that’s just as delightful and fun, but very distinctly different,” she said.