Marcel

There is a particular kind of New York restaurant critic who has decided that refinement is the enemy. You know the type. They will drive forty-five minutes to a strip mall in Queens for a bowl of noodles and call it a spiritual experience, but ask them to sit on a mohair banquette and eat lobster in a room designed by Roman and Williams and suddenly they are deeply concerned that the whole thing is too much. I respectfully disagree with this worldview. Marcel is excellent and I am not going to pretend otherwise because some critics have decided that enjoying beautiful things is a personality flaw.

Robin and Stephen Alesch — the founders of Roman and Williams, the studio behind Le Coucou, La Mercerie, and many other examples of beautiful spaces — were given the lower level of the Breuer Building at 945 Madison and told to build a restaurant inside one of the great pieces of brutalist architecture in New York. The building, if you need the context: Marcel Breuer designed it in 1966 for the Whitney Museum of American Art. The Whitney left for downtown in 2015. Sotheby's bought it for roughly $100 million, moved their global headquarters in. The result is walnut-paneled walls, warm candlelight, Breuer's original bush-hammered concrete columns preserved exactly, and an open kitchen adding a low theatrical hum to the room. If you went to the Flora Bar when it was downstairs at the Met Breuer, you have a reference point — though not the one you might expect. The Flora Bar was cold, beautiful in photographs, and not particularly inviting in person. Marcel took the same building, the same bones, and arrived at the opposite result. Warm where the Flora Bar was clinical. A room you want to stay in rather than document.

You enter from the south side of the building. A hostess walks you down to the maître d'. You are seated. The table is the first thing that gets you — the Roman and Williams-designed candlesticks in patinated bronze, the midcentury typefaces on the menus. The bread plates are fine Japanese porcelain. The glassware is handcrafted. The bar serves drinks in exquisite handcrafted Japanese glassware. Cocktails start at $45. This is not a restaurant that is pretending to be something it is not. It knows what it is and it commits. We were in a banquette. The dusty cocoa mohair upholstery is a deliberate nod to Upper East Side establishments circa 1966. I noticed this and appreciated it. Nouri sat down and immediately felt at home — which carries more weight than it might with someone else. He works for a real estate company in Hudson Yards and spent considerable time working directly with Roman and Williams on Locanda Verde there. He knows how Robin and Stephen Alesch think about a room, what they are trying to achieve, and when they have achieved it. When he sat down at Marcel and relaxed, that was a considered opinion, not a reflex.

Nouri worked directly with Roman and Williams on Locanda Verde in Hudson Yards. When he sat down at Marcel and relaxed, that was a considered opinion.

Chef-partner Marie-Aude Rose, who also runs La Mercerie in Soho, describes her cooking as a marriage of tradition and temptation. This is accurate and not annoying in the way that chef descriptions usually are, because the food actually reflects it. We started with a poached shrimp salad and deviled eggs — Nouri has strong opinions about deviled eggs and these got his approval, which is not given lightly. I had the lobster. He had the steak. Both were exactly what you want them to be: not trying to reinvent anything, just executed properly and plated like someone gave a damn. We got fries. Obviously we got fries. After a cocktail that was beautiful but slightly too ambitious for a Tuesday, I switched to gin and tonic. Nouri went red wine all night and had no regrets.

The wine program is run in partnership with Sotheby's Wine, which means access to older vintages and bottles you genuinely cannot find anywhere else. This is either the best feature of the restaurant or the most dangerous one, depending on how you feel about old Burgundy and how closely you are monitoring your expenses. We handled it with what I would describe as measured enthusiasm.

We got fries. Obviously we got fries.

The service was genuinely good — warm without being performative, attentive without hovering. The room at full capacity hit exactly the right volume. You can have a real conversation. You can also people-watch without effort, which at Sotheby's on a Tuesday evening is its own reward.

Marcel is the best new restaurant on the Upper East Side. It takes the neighborhood seriously, which the neighborhood deserves and does not always get. The critics who found it too polished were looking for a different kind of story. This is not a discovery narrative. It is a room that was designed carefully, run well, and worth your reservation. That should be enough. It is more than enough.