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The Revolving Restaurant Above Times Square Is Spinning Again
Photo: Christopher Payne
Danny Meyer has experience with “high altitude” dining, as he calls it. In 2018, he opened Manhatta on the 60th floor of the former Chase headquarters in the Financial District. Meyer says he was drawn to the various challenges of the project as well as the chief question posed by the setting: Could he create the kind of place where people would want to go even if the view were not remarkable?
Now, he’s doing it again with an added wrinkle: The new restaurant moves. The View, which opens to the public next week, is the rebirth of an establishment that slowly spun above Times Square on the 47th and 48th floors of the Marriott Marquis from the hotel’s opening in 1985 until about five years ago. “Revolving restaurants, like most of the other aspects of this building, are a show that has been playing out of town for a long time and has never much been missed on Broadway,” wrote architecture critic Paul Goldberger when the hotel first opened 40 years ago. “But this will at least be a novelty.”
This will be Meyer’s first go-round with a revolving restaurant — still the only one in the city — but he has fond memories of eating at the rotating Stouffer’s Riverfront Inn as a kid growing up in St. Louis. “It’s quite spectacular seeing Manhattan with all the lights as you revolve around,” he says. “And the revolution is so slow that you’re not even aware it’s happening unless you go to the bathroom for five minutes and come back and try to figure out where your table was.”
Tim Brenes, who works for the engineering company that first built the moving floors for the hotel, explains that a revolving restaurant is essentially a gigantic turntable that spins around a fixed middle. “Picture a doughnut that rotates,” he says. The restaurant’s floors still receive annual inspections to ensure “rotation purity,” as Brenes calls it, and the wheels were replaced completely ahead of the restaurant’s reopening. The 47th-floor dining room will take one leisurely hour to complete a full, clockwise spin, while an upstairs lounge moves at a slightly livelier 45-minute pace. (After service, staff can “rewind” or “fast-forward” the turntable so that it starts in the same uniform position every day.)
“There needs to be something that merits going through all the circuitous circulation,” says David Rockwell, the architect responsible for the restaurant’s plush, carpeted new design. In other words, he understands that diners will want to feel rewarded for having gotten to the restaurant at all from within the vast hotel. When I made my own way past the Naked Cowboy on a recent January morning, into the dark lobby and up through the Marquis’s massive atrium, I eventually found Rockwell playing Chopin waltzes on a Yamaha grand piano in the restaurant’s peaceful, light-swept dining room.
Photo: Christopher Payne/Christopher Payne
Christopher Payne/Christopher Payne
“What you’re going to see is a view that’s constantly evolving,” Rockwell explains. “There is a theatrical feeling of its being a stage, but it is also very much a viewing platform.” One of the opportunities, in Rockwell’s words, “was simplifying the palette, darkening the room so that the people were the star, and the view was the star,” he says. He installed wood panelling, thick curtains around the inner walls, aged mirrors, little glimpses of Art Deco detailing, and carpeting in rich shades of red and blue that would look at home in any of the neighborhood’s theaters. Strategic formations of credenzas and banquettes carve out corners to settle into in an otherwise cornerless room. And, since the room will be in continual motion, Rockwell’s studio added a few “sculptural anchors” to help guests navigate, like the grand piano and a massive resin–and–white alabaster lighting fixture hanging over the bar. (Another nod to local theaters: brass number plates to identify sections of the dining room to help people reorient as necessary.)
“We were very, very resolute about not being Disney-esque that we are in the Theater District but tipping our hat to what’s already there,” Meyer says. He hopes that the View can become a draw not only for audience members but for Broadway cast and crew members who, after all, need good places to go, as well.
“Even when you find your places in Times Square, if you have to walk three or four blocks, especially during the holiday season, it’s a nightmare,” says the actor Conrad Ricamora, who just finished up a run as Abraham Lincoln in Oh, Mary! at the Lyceum. Over the course of his career, Ricamora has had plenty of lobster rolls at Mermaid Oyster Bar, “trashy gay fun times” at Arriba Arriba, and cast parties at Margaritaville and Madame George. But he’s always looking for the perfect speakeasy or hideaway in the neighborhood (Joe Allen often fits the bill). “A lot of times it just feels like a huge cruise ship in Times Square, and I’m a worker on the boat,” he says.
But what about the food? Meyer — the founder of Shake Shack, remember — is prioritizing approachability. “I hope that when you see the menu here, you wouldn’t say, ‘What is that? I’ve never heard of that before. Isn’t that interesting?’” he tells me. “I hope you’ll say, ‘I can’t decide what I want to eat because it all looks like stuff I love.’”
He’s tasked executive chef Marjorie Meek-Bradley — who previously worked for Stephen Starr’s restaurant group — with putting together a roster of American classics that draw inspiration in equal measure from midwestern supper clubs and Theater District steakhouses. At the upstairs cocktail lounge, snacks will include oysters, shrimp cocktail, and other raw-bar items, along with hot hors d’oeuvre such as Boursin-stuffed mushrooms and Wagyu-ified pigs in a blanket. The dinner menu, meanwhile, is high on nostalgia (toasted ravioli, chicory Waldorf, crab cakes) and low on risk (Caesar salad, burger, roasted chicken, dry-aged rib eye). Meek-Bradley is finding ways to sneak in personality — she’s especially excited about an appetizer made with fresh hearts of palm, Turkish pistachios, and pawpaw vinegar; and a picanha steak from Snake River Farms — but she wants execution to be the detail that helps her food stand out. “I just like to kind of let things be straightforward,” Meek-Bradley says. “Shrimp cocktail might be shrimp cocktail, but I love shrimp cocktail and a lot of them suck.”
Still, how does Meyer plan to get people excited about Caesars and steaks in a city that’s currently filled with all manner of Americana-stuffed nouveau comfort-food spots? “You make sure that unlike all the rest of ’em, your restaurant revolves,” he says. “No one else is doing that.”
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