This is not preservation in the way historic preservationists talk about it. Gallaghers has history, but Mr. Poll, 60, bought the place without knowing much more than what he remembered from his boyhood as the son of a restaurateur. In the 1970s, his father ran a restaurant a few blocks away in the Time & Life Building.

“I’d see that meat box,” he said, referring to the locker at the front of Gallaghers. “I’d say, ‘That’s the kind of place I want, so you can display what you bought, show what you were doing at 3 in the morning, 4 in the morning.’” As he became the back-of-the-house boss at restaurants he ran, on his own and with his father, he came to regard the front window as a trophy case for days that began early in the meatpacking district.

Once he owned Gallaghers, he went exploring, climbing through two vacant floors in the building above the restaurant that he said “looked like the haunted house from Disneyland.” What he discovered were stacks of old menus, ashtrays, cocktail napkins and matchbooks from different eras in Gallaghers’ long history.