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A re-creation of a classic butcher-shop icon, it hangs in all 11 branches of their flagship steakhouse. “It’s a piece of Americana, that actual sign,” says Farmerie, who first noticed it during a meeting at Smith & Wollensky Boston. “We said, That’s an excellent name for a restaurant—that’s the restaurant!” he continues. “They’d been surrounding themselves with this sign for years and years.”

Once the name opened the door to the motif, an old butcher shop in their Nolita neighborhood called Albanese Meats & Poultry became the main inspiration. For years the partners had been strolling by the little shop on their way to work. Last winter, while still in the early stages of their talks with Stillman, O’Neal finally walked in. “We were all kind of curious about it,” she says. Harris continues (the partners have a tendency to finish each other’s thoughts), “All of us would do a double take and wonder about this vestige of the old community and how it had managed to hold on.”

Inside the shop O’Neal found crates of meat piled high, a jumble of old neighborhood photos, and an 80-something-year-old man named Mo carving steaks to order from behind a Plexiglas case. Well-lit, barely trafficked, and entirely out of place on a block now teeming with jewel-box boutiques, the family-owned business—a relic from an era when its neighbors were Italian, not hipster—had been in the area for nearly a century. Before long the AvroKO team had joined the after-work scene at the shop—partaking of Italian nibbles and homemade wine with Mo, his son, and a revolving cast of would-be Scorsese film extras.

With its white tile, tarnished cleavers, and well-worn chopping blocks, Albanese offered a framework for Quality Meats, filtered and translated into an overall mood. “We asked ourselves what is really pure and honest and interesting about the whole idea of crafting cuts of steak,” Harris says. “Albanese is stripped down, raw. There’s no fluff at Albanese Meats.”

The accelerated timetable left no opportunity for structural changes to the Ocean Club’s convoluted floor plan, which leads guests up and down steps through several separate dining areas on two different floors. There was also little room, beyond mood boards, for putting solid details on paper—not a problem for the four partners, who have an intuitive, almost organic, rapport. They entered the low-slung all-white restaurant space in early January and began to demolish. “The client didn’t see any sketches or renderings,” O’Neal says. “It was a complete trust factor.” As materials came down, on-the-fly drawings—on bits of cardboard and stretches of unfinished Sheetrock—outlined their replacements. “The most effective way to do it was just to grab a big fat Sharpie and start drawing,” Farmerie says. Many of those early blueprints are still there, buried in the walls or under the marble-top bars.

The AvroKO team toyed with ideas that took a literal approach to bringing Mo’s shop into the restaurant. Along with tinkering in unlikely ways with the sorts of materials found inside—the white Carrara marble would line the bar tops, the butcher block would become a base for the staircase—they began collecting antique meat cleavers and experimenting with possibile applications for the waxy brown paper that is often used to wrap meat. “We tried to get wide enough slabs of wax paper to go up along the stairs,” Farmerie says. “We wanted to incorporate paper into the space,” Harris continues, “but it wasn’t working.”

Though only physically included at the very last minute—as a mounted art installation in a hidden back room—the cleavers offered a whiff of danger that informs the whole mood of the space. For example, the dining rooms’ most striking (and macabre) design centerpiece is the meat-hook chandeliers that hang over a central series of tables.