What goes around comes around: The revolving restaurant experiences revival in the US (2025)

NEW YORK – When your ears pop on the lift ride up, that is how you know you have arrived at The View, the revolving bar and restaurant on the 47th and 48th floors of the New York Marriott Marquis.

On a recent Saturday evening, the restaurant thrummed with families, groups of friends and couples sipping champagne and devouring seafood towers as they admired the changing skyline. Every 45 minutes, just enough time to leisurely imbibe a cocktail, the lounge makes a full rotation.

Opened in Times Square in 1985 and closed in 2020, The View is the latest in a string of rotating restaurants to make an unlikely return, this one shepherded by restaurateur Danny Meyer and architect David Rockwell.

Gone are the outdated pleather dining chairs and gaudy carpet, replaced by blue velvet banquettes, a black marble bar and elegant Art Deco-style glass installations.

“This is one of the best views,” said Mr Joseph Mirrone, a former New Yorker who had stopped by with his son for a post-theatre coffee and dessert. “You can sit in one spot and the whole 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 form. “When Marriott approached us, it felt like, okay, well, that’s something we’ve never done before,” he said. “When else is someone going to say, ‘Would you like to do a revolving restaurant in the theatre district?’”

Revolving restaurants are widely regarded as novelties, relics of the 1960s and 1970s, when skylines surged ever higher and architects wanted to give the public a front seat to the rapid development happening around them.

La Ronde, a restaurant above the Ala Moana shopping centre in Honolulu, was the first in the US, opening to the public in 1961. Its architect, Mr John Graham Jr, best known for his work on the Space Needle in Seattle, patented the design. It required the construction of a wheeled turntable that could move around a stationary core, like a train on rails.

The restaurant inspired countless imitators, in cities large and small, with names that alluded to their singular party trick: the Changing Scene, in Rochester, New York; the Spindletop, in Houston; the Eagle’s Nest in Indianapolis; and the Summit, in Detroit, all promised a dining experience unlike any other.

Architect John C. Portman Jr incorporated them into a handful of the hotels he designed in Atlanta, Los Angeles and San Francisco, as well as the US$400 million (S$537 million) Marriott Marquis.

“Revolving restaurants, like most of the other aspects of this building, are a show that has been playing out of town for a long time and has never much been missed on Broadway,” The New York Times architecture critic Paul Goldberger wrote in a 1985 review of the hotel. “But this will at least be a novelty.”

The review may have presaged the beginning of the end: La Ronde closed in the 1990s after its machinery failed. The Summit became too expensive to maintain, and shuttered in 2000. Skies, at the Hyatt Regency in Kansas City, Missouri, went out of business in 2011 as the hotel’s guests increasingly opted to dine off site. Stouffer’s Top of the Riverfront permanently closed in 2014.

Others remain open for service, but ceased spinning. Both the Sun Dial in Atlanta and the restaurant atop the Reunion Tower in Dallas were the sites of gruesome accidents. The former Summit space in Detroit houses a new restaurant, but remains stationary more than 25 years after it stopped turning.

But what goes around tends to come back around. Polaris in Atlanta got moving again in 2022 with a sustainable, farm-to-table menu. In 2024, the Equinox, the revolving restaurant atop the Hyatt Regency in San Francisco, was put back into motion after an 18-year hiatus, using hydraulics to get it going. The San Francisco Chronicle reported last April that plans are under way to reopen it to the public as a bar called Club Revolve.

Reviving a revolving restaurant is rarely as simple as flipping a switch. When architecture firm Olson Kundig was hired to overhaul SkyCity, the revolving restaurant at the top of the Space Needle, “we were encouraged to go into the realm of the ridiculous”, said Mr Alan Maskin, the design principal.

The firm enhanced the experience by replacing the entire rotating floor with glass and a metal substructure that resembles a Ferris wheel turned on its side. In 2021, SkyCity was re-christened as The Loupe Lounge, an upscale seasonal cocktail bar.

For Mr Meyer, the return of revolving restaurants feels part and parcel of the post-pandemic dining shift.

Diners are craving “small bistros and neighbourhood places, and places that turned up the dial on the experience, the kind of thing you could never get at home”, he said. “We’re doing both.”

Mr Rockwell, who first visited the Marquis lounge in 1986, said the opportunity to work on The View was “irresistible”. After only a few years of disuse, the restaurant’s mechanics operated just fine; most of his work involved giving the restaurant its Mad Men-era aesthetic while being thoughtful about the experience of dining in a moving building.

To help diners and servers find their tables – it is common for visitors to become slightly disoriented when they return from the restroom – the firm added visual landmarks: a dramatic spiral staircase between the lounge and the restaurant, an alcove for a live piano player and an impossible-to-miss raw bar.

“People hear ‘rotating restaurant’ and they think it’s going to be moving fast, like they’re on a carnival ride,” said Charlie Stoop, a bartender at The View. “But it’s really not like that. It’s a really slow journey.” (The lounge rotates about 2.4m a minute.)

So far, the new The View has been well received. Mr Julio Montalvo, who was drinking cocktails with a friend in the lounge, used to visit the restaurant before the 2020 closing, he said, but stopped after the food and service declined. The high-end cocktails in the new edition won him over.

Friends Lois Blank and Keesie Spector, both 83, had also stopped by for a tipple. They last visited The View more than a decade ago, but after hearing news about the renovations, decided to return.

“It’s very nice,” Ms Blank said. “Lovely,” the other chimed in.

Perhaps The View, The Loupe Lounge, Polaris and others might inspire even more revolving restaurant revivals.

“There’s an inherent magic in dining while the world spins around you,” said Mr Daniel A. Nadeau, a general manager at the Marquis. “I’ll be curious to see if this sparks a little revolving renaissance.” NYTIMES

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