Three days after Sotheby’s successfully auctioned a Rothko for $85.8 million, I dined with the acquisitions class at Marcel, the fine-dining commissary in the auctioneer’s newly acquired (ex-Whitney, ex-Met, ex-Frick) Breuer Building. Since opening in April, Marcel has become a mandatory visit on the spring social circuit. Of course that was David Geffen I spotted dining with friends one otherwise sleepy Sunday night. The social fixture Lauren Santo Domingo, decorator Kelly Wearstler, and one of the Times’ art critics have all paraded through. The various museum-quality canvases displayed around the dining room — Willem de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Ellsworth Kelly — are themselves like dropped names, hoisted and hung.
Here, renown is its own seasoning. Even the unrecognizable have the aura of power or prestige, with the requests to match. A busy, burbling staff speeds around eagerly, offering additions and adjustments to requests I would never think to make. I watched a nearby diner ask for and receive black latex gloves for manhandling his poulet rôti.
In this kind of company, the ultimate name to drop is still Breuer’s. Ergo “Marcel,” which christens the restaurant but does not insulate it from a little aesthetic rejuvenation from Stephen and Robin Alesch of the architecture and design firm Roman and Williams, who designed the interiors and manage the restaurant. The building, Breuer’s 1966 brutalist masterpiece, is not in fact landmarked, so the Alesches have warmed its magisterially chilly interior with a partial cladding of walnut along the walls and ceiling. How you feel about a walnut overlay on Breuer’s totemic concrete is probably a good measure of how you’ll feel about Marcel.
“I hope all these built-ins are removable,” a painter I brought to dinner hissed, speaking for the contingent that throws its lot in with the museums over the auction houses and the essential over the redecorated. Removable or not, those overlays are just about the only thing in the dining room that isn’t for sale. As at the Alesches’ first restaurant, La Mercerie, inside their Roman and Williams Guild store, the flatware and glassware used to lay the tables is all available to purchase. The cocktail menu even specifies the glasses your martini will arrive in: handblown snifters by the Japanese master craftsman Naoya Arakawa. They’re beautiful, and if you’re tempted to purchase them, they’ll raise the price of a Beluga Gold Line martini from $55 to $355. Sotheby’s, not to be left out, has merchandised its own offerings into the mix, stocking the dining room with vitrines of jewelry, Yves Klein sculpture, and at least one 67-million-year-old dinosaur tooth.
Whether Marcel succeeds as a high-end showroom of art and objets — the best seat in the house is a corner banquette beneath a large, fabulous Joan Mitchell canvas from 1956 — I’m not equipped to say. As a restaurant? The spirit of brutalism compels me to be brutal: It fails. The biggest issue seems to be one of priority. With so many stakeholders bidding to steal the show, something has to give. “The glassware is great,” an interior designer I brought to dinner said. “The table settings are great. The lighting’s great. Why isn’t the food great?”
For all the toque-wearing chefs milling about the open kitchen, the cooking feels catered. It is dressy but unexciting, meekly seasoned and reticent except when it is passionately oversalted. A painterly prettiness distinguished an appetizer of leeks vinaigrette with poached pears and Kampot peppercorns, but it came beached on a truffle sauce so sandy in color and texture that it reminded me of lake silt. A gratin of cod “petals” lacked crunch, dissolving into a mushy puddle; lobster-tail “Giverny,” roasted with pineapple in a turmeric-ginger cream, sounded appealing but tasted flat upon its arrival. An $88 half-portion of sole meunière, that upper-crust standard, felt underadorned, skimpy and baitlike. A $55 confit duck leg was better, tender and gamy, but with its usual accompaniment of orange and only a frilled length of cabbage for company provided no great excitement. It was left to poulet au paprika, with a teaspoonful of sauerkraut, to deliver the only zip I found across my meals.
The kitchen focuses on traditional French cooking, but results are mixed. Hugo Yu.
The kitchen focuses on traditional French cooking, but results are mixed. Hugo Yu.
Marcel’s overseeing chef is Marie-Aude Rose, whom the Alesches first brought on to run La Mercerie downtown. There, her menu (now overseen day-to-day by the capable Heloïse Fischbach) leans French country, with bouillabaisse and boeuf bourguignon; uptown at Marcel, we lean French country estate, with a fustiness cultivated with consommé and beef en gelée. Popular appreciation for these indestructible classics waxes and wanes, but there’s plenty of proof citywide that these dishes, properly prepared, can still impress jaded New York diners. In this space, with these backers, at these prices and this anticipation, you’d better be serving the town’s best versions of them, and so far, Marcel isn’t. We picked over a plate of frogs’ legs with none of the sizzle or snap that make eating frog worth it in the first place, and a jellied boeuf à la mode whose flavorless Muscat gelée quickly separated from its tangle of beef. Once, novelty might have distinguished these relative rarities. But in a dining landscape that includes Le Veau d’Or, Zimmi’s, and Le Chêne, they suffer by comparison.
It may be that here the clientele — never the customer — is always right, which is a fine way to run a store and a limp way to run a restaurant. An entire section of the menu is given over to a “que voulez-vous” list of proteins that can be cooked in whichever manner customers request, effectively negating the expertise that a chef of Rose’s caliber brings to the proceedings. While you’re calling the shots, be prepared to accessorize expensively. Every side, from an exhaustive list of 10, is $22, even the “grand laitue,” which several people at my tables asked to have translated. Voilà: It is a “big lettuce,” neither more nor less, served as an entire head, like a large rose blossom in a clear-glass bowl.
The bright spot, and there is a bright spot, comes late, with pastry chef Rae Gaylord’s supersize desserts. Six different options are listed under the heading “Les Grands,” with prices — starting at $29 and rising to $54 — to match. I can’t imagine a better way to celebrate the successful purchase of a green Warhol Brigitte Bardot than with a Paris-Brest the size of a tricycle wheel or a vacherin whose meringue dome is so structurally sound that it’s presented with its own brass mallet to compromise. For the rest of us, the “petite” desserts are not without their own rewards. I don’t think I’ve had a better baba au rhum than Marcel’s, a cartoon-perfect barrel of cake bathed in rum crowned with a single emoji-like black cherry. Then there’s the “Window on Marcel,” which adroitly reimagines Breuer’s eyelid-like window above in vanilla mousse, almond croustillant, and vanilla-milk jam. It’s a folly but at last, at least, a worthy homage.
Desserts are the strongest part of any meal. Hugo Yu.
Desserts are the strongest part of any meal. Hugo Yu.
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