Nearly 2,000 years ago, Rome burned for seven nights straight. Nero, the 26-year-old emperor, did not fiddle through the disaster, as famously claimed — bowed string instruments didn’t exist — but as soon as the flames died down, he started building a vast palace over the ruins, big enough to house a 120-foot-tall statue of himself. There he alternately wooed and menaced his fellow aristocrats in a round banquet hall that rotated on a giant pillar, likely powered by flowing water, while pipes in the ceiling rained down perfume.
We have megalomania to thank, then, for the world’s first revolving dining room. Not until the 20th century did anyone attempt such a feat again.
Starting in the late 1950s, restaurants were set whirling atop towers around the world, a trend that spread from Honolulu and Cairo to Reykjavik, Jaipur and beyond. The timing made sense: Humans in spaceships were being propelled into larger orbit, and those left on the ground wanted a peek at untethered vistas, too, preferably between mouthfuls of shrimp cocktail.
By 1985, when the Marriott Marquis Hotel opened in New York with its own spinner 47 floors above Times Square, the fad was long past cool. The New York Times architecture critic, Paul Goldberger, groused that the whole building was “bombastic” and “out of touch.” Nevertheless, the dining room continued to churn through its 360 degrees — slowly, by millimeters, clocking one revolution every 90 minutes — until the pandemic pulled the plug.
Five years later, the restaurateur Danny Meyer has come to the rescue with the gentlest of glow-ups. The spot retains its literal-minded name, the View, because why bury the lede? The new décor — dusky-blue velvet drapes, carpet as red as the inside of a mouth — pays homage to both the theaters far below and those razed to make way for the hotel decades ago, in what became known as the Great Theater Massacre.
No ascent to the heavens is straightforward. After you run the gantlet of Times Square and locate the lonesome check-in desk on the third floor, you’re escorted to a rotunda of elevators and sent rocketing up the atrium. It is deeply un-New York to eat so early, but you want it all: the last of the afternoon light burning through the windows, then sunset’s long orange smear, blue night massing like a thunderhead, and all the buildings coming on like constellations.
The food? Early on, revolving restaurants offered a sci-fi glimpse of the future; now they’re a comforting retreat to the past. (The future is here, and we don’t like it.)
The executive chef, Marjorie Meek-Bradley, who ran the kitchen at Pastis, cracks open a head of baby iceberg lettuce and heaps it with creamy-yolked quail eggs, juice bombs of cherry tomatoes and salty-sweet lardons you could pop like candy. Tuna carpaccio comes in blushing strips rubbed with tiny bursts of finger lime. Of course there’s shrimp cocktail, nicely plumped and arrayed on ice, under shavings of fresh horseradish that melt and sting at the same time.
The steaks are serious, including a gorgeous picanha with a half-inch cap of snowy white fat that runs down into the flesh as it’s broiled. Too bad the sides, apart from a toss of spring-bright peas and yielding carrots, were mostly forgettable — those button mushrooms would never pass muster at Mr. Meyer’s Gramercy Tavern — and on one of my visits, the black bass en papillote, the lightest of the entrees, was glumly fishy.
Oh, look, there’s the Chrysler Building!
No need to get fancy. Order the burger with its generous cone of fries — crispy, salty, keeping you reaching back in — and end with the chocolate cake. The pastry chef, Emily Fu, understands why it’s called devil’s food: three layers of darkness, shape-shifting between sponge and fudge, with seams of chocolate caramel ganache and a tableside pour-over of hot salted caramel. Each forkful is too much and not enough. Tables are attended by a small army of servers, whose unabashed friendliness (ardent even by Mr. Meyer’s standards) could give tourists the wrong idea about New York. When a tequila order went awry, no fewer than three people mobilized to solve the issue, returning every few minutes with updates until the amended drink was in hand.
All the while the world is turning, or rather you are. The core of the restaurant stays still. Out of the corner of an eye you might see a grand piano go by, with an elegant musician slyly teasing bossa nova or Nirvana — or both at once — from the keys. Guests plan restroom forays strategically, when the paths align. You must seize the moment.
Mr. Goldberger’s complaint about the Marriott Marquis was that its banal architecture had nothing to do with New York. “It is a small-town view of urban glamour,” he wrote.
And yet it’s good to be reminded that this is how many outsiders see our city, in all its dripping neon, its cockiness, its refusal to accept things as they are. You step off the elevator and there it is, through the windows, New York as promised. I don’t care how long you’ve lived here, it still has that power. You can taste your heart in your mouth.
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Ligaya Mishan is a chief restaurant critic for The Times.
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