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Letter of Recommendation: Revolving Restaurants
When I was 9, my dad took me to lunch at 360 Restaurant in Toronto’s CN Tower, then the tallest free-standing tower in the world. At the time, we lived in Saskatchewan, where my father was a judge serving the remote, northern parts of the province, flying into far-flung communities for court. Though this eventually took a toll on my family, as a child I always associated my dad’s absence with romantic adventure, and this father-son trip to Toronto only deepened my sense that any life away from home was one characterized by rich, unending discovery. It’s the visit to the CN Tower that still stands out most in my mind about that trip: Dining in a rotating restaurant in the sky, in a city so big that you could not clearly distinguish its edges, seemed to me the greatest thing in the world. Each moment, something new.
For decades, the world’s most famous revolving restaurant was located atop the Seattle Space Needle, which was built for the 1962 World’s Fair and literally named for the Space Age optimism of the era. From the late 1950s through the ’70s, dozens of cities in the United States and Europe built towers capped with rotating restaurants: the Florianturm in Dortmund, Germany (1959), was the first, followed by the Ala Moana Center in Honolulu (1961). Many more popped up around the world — the BT Tower in London, the Grand Nile Tower in Cairo, the Holiday Inn in Beirut — until they fell out of favor in the 1980s and ’90s. You might reasonably dismiss revolving restaurants as kitsch, or worse: imperious eyesores, turning a city’s skyline into a tacky tribute to “The Jetsons.” That’s not to mention the food, which is as overpriced as it is beside the point. For me, these restaurants have always evoked the spirit of ridiculous audacity that many of our cities lack today. They’re civic boosterism in physical form: We built a tower so you can properly enjoy the other towers we’re so proud of having built.
A Connecticut-based company called Macton built the bulk of America’s revolving restaurants — more than 100 — during the trend’s glory days. The company still exists, but the reigning king of the rotating-restaurant space is now a Chinese firm called Weizhong. That should come as little surprise, considering that most of the world’s new revolving restaurants over the last 20 years have been built in Asia. My own wanderings, both professional and personal, eventually took me there for many years abroad, mostly in China. In Asia, audacity reigns. Ceaseless development is certainly not good in and of itself, but it does, at least to some degree, speak to the prevailing sentiment of a people.
Every time I took the train from Beijing to Shanghai, there seemed to be a new skyline-defining building twisting into the clouds. I went on a reporting trip to Guangzhou, a city that I had scarcely heard of, and found that from almost any vantage point of modest height, you could spot an enormous tower. It was the Canton Tower, which, at 1,982 feet, surpassed the CN as the world’s tallest free-standing tower when it opened in 2010 — and yes, it had a revolving restaurant. (It has since been surpassed by a tower in Tokyo, topped by a restaurant that doesn’t revolve.)
Once, on an assignment in North Korea, I had a beer in the revolving restaurant on top of the Yanggakdo International Hotel, whose fortresslike structure in Pyongyang is one of the few places in the capital where foreigners are allowed to stay. The restaurant spun so slowly you could barely tell, offering views of what was a pretty spectacular city, at least to the eye: Futuristic skyscrapers, monuments to the leaders, urban sprawl out to the mountains. Unmissable was the Ryugyong Hotel, the unfinished pyramidal structure that was to feature not one but five rotating restaurants. Pyongyang may be decades behind its neighbors, but the towers said otherwise: Ours is a city to behold, to marvel at.
When I moved to New York City from Beijing in 2013, I had the surreal feeling that I had come from the future to a not-so-distant past. In China, I’d experienced six years of near relentless optimism. In the United States, I encountered a kind of pessimism and listlessness that I didn’t expect. It was almost as if Americans had settled for a kind of Yelp-reviewed urban sameness: third-wave coffee shops and facsimiles of Brooklyn bars. The same is true in Europe. Same polished concrete floors, same nebulous sense of where you are. Purgatory is a cafe stacked with Kinfolk.
I started to wonder if New York even had a revolving restaurant, and I was happy to find that it did: the View, which opened in the Marriott Marquis in Times Square almost 35 years ago. I met a friend there for drinks after work one day. A John Mayer song was playing, and there was a buffet with a chocolate fountain. I ordered a gin martini with a lemon twist. The rotation was faster than I thought it would be — a 360-degree turn per hour — resulting in a slightly disorienting feeling that went well with alcohol. Our server told us that when she travels, she likes to check out the competition, visiting revolving restaurants in cities such as Auckland, New Zealand; Hong Kong; and Vancouver, British Columbia — a fact my companion and I found delightful as we sipped our second martinis, marveling at the sheer might and scale of Midtown Manhattan as it silently zipped by. I found myself relieved by a gentle reminder that maybe I’d come to the right place, after all — New York City, this great experiment. The audacity still exists here. You just have to look for it.
Mitch Moxley is a writer and an editor in New York.
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