WORK • Events
The Marriott Marquis is one of the weirdest places in New York City. I know this from having spent too many hours inside during the last decade when I ran a media company that hosted an annual event there.
Even in Times Square, where it’s located, the Marquis stood out for its uncoolness — awkward, bulky, full of bad lighting, garish carpeting, and aging-airport-style eateries. Guests with name cards pinned to their lapels crisscross the walkways, hustling into glass elevators that climb the middle of the space.
One of those elevators, if you can find it (regular’s tip: it departs from floor 3), ascends to the top of the hotel, where New York City’s lone revolving restaurant occupies floors 47 and 48. It opened in 1985 and closed in 2020. I never ate dinner there during that run, but I’d been up for sponsor event parties, where the corporate karaoke was the cherry on the Marquis sundae.
Last Tuesday, Lock and I were back for cocktails and a preview of the reopened The View, now in the hands of Danny Meyer’s Union Square Hospitality Group. USHG enlisted The Rockwell Group to renovate the space, which they did in a rich palette of burl wood, antique mirrors, metallic paint, and velvet drapery. Both floors still revolve, the upper bar and lounge at one turn every 45 minutes and the lower dining room at once an hour. Chef Majorie Meek-Bradley’s menu is full of crowd-pleasers, steaks and chops and “supper club classics” like tuna carpaccio, a Caesar, roasted chicken, and cheesecake.
Both Meyer and David Rockwell were in the room on this night, giving tours and delivering their pitch for a reclaimed landmark that will draw theater-goers and everyday New Yorkers alongside tourists and conventioneers. We took in the scenery and admired the hustle, two NYC restaurant icons still showing up in Times Square on a Tuesday night.
We were there just long enough for a complete rotation, after which we made the long journey down through the belly of the hotel and onto 46th St., where the line for Hamilton was snaking around the corner, no doubt full of future patrons of New York City’s only revolving restaurant. –Josh Albertson