Marcel’s dining room.
Photo: Rich Stapleton
When Robin and Stephen Alesch decided to include a restaurant in their plans for Roman and Williams Guild, the Soho retail wing of their design studio, it may have been out of necessity. “No one gets up on a Saturday and goes, ‘Oh God, I’m just dying to buy a sofa,’” Robin says. “We wanted smells, taste, and that whole sensory experience to be part of the shopping.” That restaurant, La Mercerie, became famous in its own right for its luxe trappings and chef Marie-Aude Rose’s classical French cooking. This week, the entire team is expanding quite a way uptown with Marcel, inside the brutalist Breuer building that is home to Sotheby’s (in the soaring, concrete-clad room that was previously Danny Meyer’s first Untitled and Ignacio Mattos’s Flora Bar).
“Stephen and I have always been interested in reigniting great pieces of architecture that sometimes become a little frozen,” says Robin. “This building had soul and that potential. And so we thought, Could this become the uptown sibling of La Mercerie?”
Underneath a concrete bridge that connects the building to Madison Avenue, the Breuer’s former sculpture garden has been reimagined as a more casual extension of the dining room — starting next month, it will be open for breakfast and lunch with a marble bar, umbrellas, and plush patio furniture. It also features a new, private entrance from the street level, in an effort to reinforce Marcel’s status as a destination of its own right, not just a cafeteria for Sotheby’s employees and patrons.
“We have this tension between the masculine and feminine, uptown and downtown, old and new,” says Rose. The same tension, she explains, is true of the food at Marcel. Rose is especially excited to dive deeper into French classics, like a beef terrine with horseradish, haricots verts, and Muscat gelée; gratins of cod; and consommé with bone marrow. They’re dishes La Mercerie’s Soho audience “might not appreciate” in quite the same way she believes an uptown crowd, which has proved more than willing to embrace more traditional French cooking if the comeback of Le Veau d’Or is any indication, might. (But then, the menu’s “Que Voulez-vous?” section may tempt the area’s more … particular guests who will be able to request turbot, salmon, or hangar steak simply cooked exactly as they’d like.)
There’s more: “Marie bakes a ton, and so we always wanted to put a bakery in La Mercerie, but just didn’t have the room,” Robin says. Here, a separate bakery offers all-day counter service with baby-blue boxes of yuzu, raspberry, and chocolate-filled madeleines, breads, croissants, and entremets. (Large-format cakes like a Hungarian Dobos torte, flan Parisien, or strawberries-and-cream tart are available for preorder, as well.) Also available to go: select bottles from the wine list, which — because it pulls from the Sotheby’s cellar — grants access to vintages typically only offered through private auctions.
That association with the auction house extends to the décor, which features rotating rarities and masterpieces: Paintings from Joan Mitchell and Helen Frankenthaler face each other above the banquets, while a Lalanne sheep watches from a corner. Glass vitrines scattered among the dining room contain a T. rex tooth as well as vintage jewelry from Pierre Cardin and Andrew Grima. On the way to the restroom, you might pass a Calder or a Lichtenstein. See something you like? This isn’t a museum: Make an offer and see what happens. “The collection in the dining room will change every few months,” Robin says, “so it might be an entirely different restaurant from one visit to the next.”
Steak haché à la Française.
Photo: Nico Schinco
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