Painfully sceney as it is, The Corner Store is a smash with a winning blueprint: Applebee’s meets The Polo Bar, with a light dusting of nostalgia. It’s also one of the toughest reservations in NYC. Sister restaurant The Eighty Six, in the West Village, is more ambitious, less consistent, and even harder to sneak your way into. The Art Deco steakhouse in the old Chumley’s space doubles down on The Corner Store’s upscale Americana, ratcheting up the exclusivity, dialing up the service, and piling on gimmicks for a crowd that’s too famous, too bored, or too image-conscious for something so plain as Smith & Wollensky. The food occasionally falls off the rails, so it’s tough to recommend the place on purely culinary grounds. But if you want to be fussed over while you strain your neck trying to see if that really is Elton John in that booth, The Eighty Six will do the trick in style. It’s as if the roughly 12-table restaurant had an open call for slick ideas and couldn't say no to anything. To start, there are complimentary pickles tastefully dressed with chives and horseradish. To finish, a free grasshopper cocktail paired with lemon sorbet, delivered by a server in a double-breasted suit. In between, you can enjoy a zippy pornstar martini made with carbonated Chablis, and a Waldorf salad that scraps the usual ingredients in favor of figs, endive, and ample blue cheese. Some of the Catch sibling's gimmicks, like that Waldorf salad and a corn pot pie encased in croissant dough, work. Others feel like they’re trying too hard. Too hard to go viral, too hard to justify the impossible reservation, and too hard to stuff you with cholesterol in the hopes that you’ll mistake the feeling for fulfillment. You don’t really need that filet with foie gras and truffle butter entombed in bordelaise, and you’re better off skipping the $39 wagyu cheesesteak with congealed alpine cheese. Even when you start to feel like you’ve fallen into a shiny trap built to siphon off your excess income, it’s hard to stay mad. Steak knives are vintage (salvaged from France), tap water is poured from crystal decanters, and the same host who decides whether you deserve the rare walk-in seat will provide a tableside history of the room’s speakeasy roots (omitting any mention of previous tenant Frog Club). A single Andes mint to close things out is just one of many nice touches. Despite its efforts, The Eighty Six can’t match the broad appeal of The Corner Store, but there are worse things than trying too hard.