The rumble in your ears as you take the elevator means you’ve arrived at View, the revolving bar and restaurant on the 47th and 48th floors of the New York Marriott Marquis.
On a recent Saturday night, the restaurant was packed with families, friends and couples sipping champagne and tucking into seafood towers as they took in the ever-changing skyline. Every 45 minutes, the lounge rotates once, just enough time to linger over a cocktail.
View, which opened in Times Square in 1985 and closed in 2020, is the latest in a series of rotating restaurants to make an unexpected return, helmed by restaurateur Danny Meyer and architect David Rockwell. Gone are the dated faux-leather dining chairs and ornate rugs, replaced by blue velvet banquettes, a black marble bar and elegant Art Deco glass fixtures.
“It’s one of the best views,” said Joseph Mirrone, a former New Yorker who stopped by for coffee and dessert with his son after a movie. “You can sit in one spot and the city revolves around you.”
Mr. Meyer, who has his own warm childhood memories of Stouffer’s Top of the Riverfront, a revolving restaurant in St. Louis, was eager to update the plan. “When Marriott approached us, we felt, well, this is something we’ve never done before,” he said. “When else is someone going to say, ‘Do you want to open a revolving restaurant in the theater district?’”
Revolving restaurants are widely viewed as a novelty, a relic of the 1960s and 1970s, when skylines grew taller and architects wanted to allow the public to witness the rapid development around them.
Located above the Ala Moana Shopping Center in Honolulu, La Ronde was the first La Ronde restaurant in the U.S., opening to the public in 1961. Its architect, John Graham Jr., best known for his work on Seattle’s Space Needle, patented the design. It entailed building a turntable on wheels that could move around a fixed core, like a train on tracks.
The restaurant inspired countless imitators in cities large and small, with names that hinted at their unique party tricks: Changing Scene in Rochester, New York, Spindletop in Houston, Eagle’s Nest in Indianapolis, and Summit in Detroit, all promising a dining experience unlike any other.
Architect John C. Portman Jr. incorporated them into several of his hotels in Atlanta, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, as well as the $400 million Marriott Marquis.
“The revolving restaurant, like most other aspects of the building, is a show that has been running long out of town and never missed on Broadway,” Paul Goldberger, architecture critic for The New York Times, wrote in a review of the hotel in 1985. “But it is at least a novelty.”
This review may be the beginning of the end: La Ronde closed in the 1990s due to machine failures. Summit became too expensive to maintain and closed in 2000. Skies at the Hyatt Regency Kansas City, Missouri, closed in 2011 as hotel guests increasingly chose to eat off-site. Stouffer’s Top of the Riverfront closed permanently in 2014.
Others are still open but have stopped spinning: Atlanta’s Sun Dial and the restaurant atop Reunion Tower in Dallas have both had horrific accidents. Detroit’s Summit now has a new restaurant but remains stationary 25 years after it stopped spinning.
But what goes around comes around: Polaris in Atlanta reopened in 2022 with a sustainable farm-to-table menu. Equinox, the revolving restaurant atop the Hyatt Regency San Francisco, reopened using hydraulic technology after an 18-year closure in 2024. The San Francisco Chronicle reported last April that plans were underway to reopen it as a bar called Club Revolve, open to the public.
Resuming operations at a revolving restaurant is no simple matter of flipping a switch. When the architecture firm Olson Kundig was hired to overhaul SkyCity, the revolving restaurant atop the Space Needle, “we were encouraged to go into the realm of the absurd,” said design principal Alan Maskin.
The firm enhanced the experience by replacing the entire revolving floor with a glass and metal base that makes it look like a Ferris wheel on its side. In 2021, SkyCity was rebranded as the Loupe Lounge, an upscale seasonal cocktail bar.
For Meyer, the return of revolving restaurants is an important part of the post-pandemic transformation of dining. Diners are craving “bistros and neighborhood restaurants, and restaurants that elevate the experience in a way you can never get at home,” he said. “We’re doing both.”
Mr. Rockwell, who first visited the Marquis Lounge in 1986, said the opportunity to help design View was “irresistible.” The restaurant had been closed for only a few years, and its mechanicals were in good working order; much of his work was to give it a “Mad Men-era aesthetic,” while also taking into account the experience of dining in a mobile building.
To help diners and servers find their tables — it’s easy to get lost after returning from the restroom — the company has added visual landmarks: a dramatic spiral staircase between the lounge and dining room, an alcove for live pianists and a can’t-miss raw bar.
“When people hear ‘revolving restaurant,’ they think it’s going to spin really fast, like a carnival ride,” said Charlie Stoop, a bartender at the View. “But it’s not. It’s a really slow ride.” (The lounge spins about 8 feet per minute.)
So far, the new version of the View has been well received. Julio Montalvo, who was drinking cocktails in the lounge with friends, said he frequented the restaurant before it closed in 2020, but stopped going when the food and service declined. The new version’s high-end cocktails won him over.
Lois Blank, 83, and Keesie Spector, friends since they were 13, also stopped in for a drink. They last visited the View bar more than a decade ago, but decided to return after hearing about its renovations.
“It’s wonderful,” Ms. Blank said. Ms. Spector echoed, “It’s wonderful.”
Perhaps the View, the Loupe Lounge, the Polaris and others could inspire a renaissance in more revolving restaurants. “There’s something magical about dining when the world is spinning around you,” said Daniel A. Nadeau, the general manager of the Marquis. “I’m curious if this will spark a little bit of a revolving restaurant renaissance.”
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