Seeing New York City from above—from the upper deck of the Empire State Building, or from the window of an airplane making an up-the-Hudson approach to LaGuardia Airport—is always a disorienting rush. There are the vast arcs of the avenues, the great green slashes of parks and cemeteries, the jagged field of skyscrapers, steepled and spiked like iron filings pulled up toward the great magnet of the sky. On the ground, too, the city is a spectacle: sit on any stoop, or at any sidewalk café, and take in the sounds of man and machine, the polychromatics of the auto garages and the shoppy shops, the endless side scroll of cars and foot traffic. It’s a twenty-four-hour show whose run never closes. The View, a newly opened restaurant taking over the top of the New York Marriott Marquis, a concrete hulk of a hotel in Times Square, belongs to neither stratum. In the decades since the hotel opened, in 1985, new structures have risen around and above it. Today, the view from the View is mostly of office towers and hotels. You look out of the windows and see other windows, eye to eye.
But, wait, it revolves! Set inside a vast glass-encased aerie, the restaurant comprises two stories—a lounge above and a dining room below—each resting atop an enormous rotating platform, whose mechanisms are effectively the same as those of train-yard turntables. Few touristy gimmicks are more touristy or more gimmicky than a spinning restaurant, which efficiently combines observation-deck gawking with the mundane necessity of eating dinner. The View opened in February, reinvigorating a space that had sat empty for a few years. Before that, it contained a buffet-based situation that catered to a stupendous volume of customers and had no culinary or cultural impact on the city whatsoever. (It closed in the early months of the pandemic.) Now, operated by the famed restaurateur Danny Meyer’s Union Square Hospitality Group, the View is making a bid for something beyond travel-guidebook oblivion. It is a touristy restaurant that isn’t a tourist trap—a place that even the most jaded local might actually want to swing by (swing up to?) for a pre-theatre drink or a special-occasion meal.
Cocktails are served in the lounge, a floor above the dining room.
The tourist in New York City faces dining needs that may or may not align with those of the local population. Where to eat lunch before a weekend matinée at Lincoln Center? Brunch on a Tuesday? A wee-hours half-meal to prevent a pleasant buzz from levelling up to the spins? If you really want to live like a local, the answer to all three might be scarfing leftover couscous straight out of Tupperware, in your apartment, in your underwear. It’s left to the out-of-towners to breathe the real-New York air at Café Fiorello, Breakfast by Salt’s Cure, and Prince St. Pizza—places that aren’t necessarily very good, but which specialize in what the academic and social theorist Dean MacCannell, in his seminal 1976 work on tourism as a social phenomenon, called “staged authenticity.”
There are a few clues—besides the big, shticky, rotating one—that the View might be another such restaurant. The menu has instances of “New York” theming, with cocktails inspired by Magnolia Bakery’s banana pudding and the pastrami sandwich at Katz’s Deli. The background music, pleasantly tinkled nightly by a real person sitting at a real piano, mixes in pop melodies alongside the Broadway classics and jazz standards. But there are also a few tells that the View is a place catering to locals—or, at least, a place where locals might not have their anti-touristic allergies triggered. The muted, elegant interiors, for instance, are designed by David Rockwell, whose burgundies and golds evoke the dramatics of the theatre district without overtly caricaturing it. The wine list is strikingly good and (also strikingly) not terribly expensive. The establishment’s subtle sense of dual purpose is something of a Danny Meyer signature. In 2005, when he opened the Modern, a fine-dining restaurant inside the then newly renovated Museum of Modern Art, one of the most notable details was that it had its own street entrance, which allowed patrons to come in for dinner without the touristy indignity of patronizing the museum.
