Restaurant Review: Marcel

At Marcel, nearly everything in the dining room is available for purchase, including the plates on which the food is served.Photographs by Morgan Levy for The New Yorker Save this story Save this story Save this story Save this story You’re reading the Food Scene newsletter, Helen Rosner’s guide to what, where, and how to eat. Sign up to receive it in your inbox.To descend the stairs into Marcel, the new French-continental restaurant on the lower level of the Breuer building, on Madison Avenue, is to watch a brutalist masterpiece surrender, with a kind of gracious compliance, to the softening influence of a great deal of money. The building, which now serves as Sotheby’s global headquarters, was partially landmarked last year, so Marcel Breuer’s original concrete columns and his grid of circular light fixtures remain. But the dining room has been upholstered, metaphorically and, at times, literally, into submission. The mohair-wrapped banquettes are the minky greige of cocoa powder and have the downy hand of a Max Mara wrap coat. The walls that aren’t subject to preservation are sheathed in vast Claro walnut panels of a sinuous, almost figurative grain. A mirrored bar that anchors one end of the space is lined with Bauhaus-era leather stools, and Breuer-designed lighting sourced, naturally, at auction.

Breuer’s blocky, cantilevered structure—“harshly handsome,” as the Times critic Ada Louise Huxtable put it, on occasion of its 1966 opening—was originally built to house the Whitney Museum of American Art. After the Whitney decamped downtown, in 2015, the space passed to the Met and then to the Frick, before Sotheby’s purchased it in 2023, for a reported hundred million dollars. The restaurant is a partnership between Sotheby’s and the designer-restaurateurs Robin and Stephen Alesch, better known as Roman & Williams, who are responsible for the look of many famously beautiful restaurants (Le Coucou, the Boom Boom Room) and have a growing portfolio of their own spots, including La Mercerie, in SoHo. Here, as there, they have executed a full-spectrum takeover—of the food, the branding, the objects on the walls and in the display cases, even the custom three-hundred-dollar coupes in which the Martinis arrive, each one hand-blown by a celebrated Japanese glass artist.

The restaurant doubles as a showroom for Sotheby’s, with for-sale works by the likes of Helen Frankenthaler and Joan Mitchell on the walls.There is a distinction worth drawing between luxury and beauty, or more precisely between opulence and grace. Marcel is a useful case study. Everything about the place signals a level of unrestricted aesthetic devotion at which money seems almost an abstract annoyance. There’s a Helen Frankenthaler on the wall, and a Robert Indiana tucked coyly under the stairs. And yet money, in its most indiscreet sense, is everywhere: each piece of flatware and plateware is available for purchase, as your server may mention, and bronze-framed vitrines that serve as subtle room dividers display treasures from Sotheby’s—a claw-like Chaumet necklace, a pocket-size John Chamberlain “tidbit” sculpture—with placards noting, pointedly, “price available on request.” In the dining room’s previous lives—say, as Flora Bar, in the Met days—lunch might be followed by a wander upstairs to see a collection of Munch or Celmins paintings, and diners at Marcel can similarly tour certain Sotheby’s floors that are open to the public. Still, there is a fundamental difference between a show and a showroom: one is culture, the other is retail. Restaurants, at their best, are adept at fusing the two, which I suspect is why Marcel feels compelling and coherent even when its corporate landlord fails to muffle the ka-ching of the cash registers.