Can Danny Meyer get people to shell out the big bucks at a Times Square hotel? That’s what his Union Square Hospitality Group is betting on. They’ve taken over the View, New York’s revolving restaurant inside the New York Marriott Marquis at 1535 Broadway, at West 45th Street, near Times Square.
In the transition, the View has temporarily paused its rotations while Rockwell Group overhauls the interior design of the 47th-floor dining room to be more of an “elegant supper club vibe,” according to the New York Times. Eater has reached out to Union Square Hospitality for more information.
The View was previously operated as an all-you-can-eat buffet — a business model hard to run (just look at Red Lobster), but drawing a resurgence amidst inflation for the budget-conscious. Meyer’s team is attempting to attract new customers by flipping it into a fine dining operation. The chef of the restaurant has not yet been named but an opening is slated for this winter.
Revolving restaurants gained prominence in the 1960s with a moving restaurant atop Seattle’s Space Needle built for the World’s Fair (though they had been in the works elsewhere for decades prior) as a symbol of technological prowess. They lost popularity by the 1990s and many have since closed. A New York Times Magazine piece in 2019 recommended that the world needed more revolving restaurants now, more than ever. Revolving restaurants can offer more than Jetsons-era kitsch, according to its author: “These restaurants have always evoked the spirit of ridiculous audacity that many of our cities lack today. They’re civic boosterism in physical form: We built a tower so you can properly enjoy the other towers we’re so proud of having built.”
The fact that New York still had a last-of-its-kind revolving restaurant might come as a surprise. It had fallen out of fashion over its nearly four decades in the heart of the Theater District, and the building had seen better days, particularly as more flashy hotels have gone up in the area and visitation to Midtown waned during the pandemic. (Elsewhere in the city, the Rainbow Room’s rotating dance floor has its own lore and a revolving rooftop restaurant once in Rochester claims to be New York state’s first before it closed in the 1980s).
