The Splendid wants to solve a very specific Midtown problem: what to do when the game’s on, but you’ve aged out of watching it standing up with a plastic cup in your hand. Steps from Rockefeller Center, St. Patrick’s Cathedral and Radio City Music Hall, with Fifth Avenue’s shopping close enough to justify a halftime pit stop, this self-declared “New York’s Finest Sporting Club” has built a room where every screen has the game without making anyone trade comfort for a good view of it.
Calling a sports bar “splendid” sounds a little off-brand until you see the room. The space splits the difference between a polished steakhouse and a sleek lounge, the kind of place where a business lunch and a Sunday football spread can both feel appropriate. Service moves with the kind of backstage choreography usually reserved for rooms twice as expensive, with water glasses topped off before you notice they’re low, plates cleared at exactly the right beat, and without anyone hovering.
Credit for the food goes to chef Joey Fortunato, previously of West Village’s Extra Virgin, who runs a kitchen that’s ambitious without overreaching: a raw bar, Osetra caviar service and a Warm Lobster Tart share menu space with prime steaks that top out at a 42-ounce Tomahawk built for two. The calamari, dusted in pretzel crumb, has developed its own following, and the cauliflower steak proves the vegetarians in the group aren’t an afterthought.
The bar keeps pace. A seasonal cocktail program anchors around the ice-cold Freezer Martini and a mole-laced M&M Marg, well beyond the beer-and-rail-drinks lineup most sports bars settle for. Winter brings a Hot Buttered Rum, spiked with cinnamon, clove and black pepper, that’s talked several regulars into a second round on genuinely frigid afternoons.
What also makes The Splendid worth the visit outside of game day is the sheer range of hours it stays open. Breakfast starts at 8am on weekdays, and dinner runs until 10pm every night of the week, with weekend mornings given over to brunch instead of the usual breakfast and lunch split. Few Midtown East spots are built to catch someone at literally every part of their day, from the first coffee meeting to last call.
Behind it all is Stout NYC Hospitality Group, the family operation that’s been running New York restaurants since 1974, when Irish immigrants Teddy and Maggie Whelan opened Maggie’s Place a few blocks over. Their son Martin and his chef brother Mark eventually grew that single spot into 16 bars and restaurants across Manhattan and Queens, and The Splendid reads like the group applying everything they've learned across their other rooms: polished enough for a client dinner, loose enough for a Sunday spent cheering at a screen.
For groups bigger than a table for four, five private and semi-private spaces handle everything from a 25-person gathering in the Poet’s Corner to a 200-person event in the Whitman Room mezzanine, both named with more literary ambition than most sports bars ever attempt (or understand). A dedicated events team builds out customizable packages for whichever occasion lands on the calendar: corporate holiday party, milestone birthday or just a group that wants to wear face paint, yell at refs and do touchdown dances without anyone noticing. It’s a fitting setup for a place that’s trying to prove elevated and easygoing aren’t opposites, just different settings on the same room.
Instagram: @thesplendidnyc