What Marcel Is Selling

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.

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.

The room draws a certain type: celebrities of the later-in-career variety, people just living their wealthy lives rather than performing them, many very beautiful women sporting a lot of truly excellent cosmetic work. During one of my meals there, on a trip to the rest room (which requires passing an Yves Klein “Venus”: striking, sublime, and available, of course, for purchase) I found myself party to an impassioned debate about The Formula x Meredith, a currently à-la-mode boutique fitness studio in the Hamptons, and whether the best move is to pay for a whole year up front or go month to month. Plenty of restaurants in New York are preposterously expensive, and Marcel is, too—a cocktail alone can run more than forty bucks—but the restaurant pulls off the much rarer trick of feeling actually rich. The tell, if you need a tell, is a section of the menu that invites the diner to build her own main course, with a fillet of fish or a cut of steak cooked and sauced to her specifications—a built-in concession to diners guided by cardiologists or dieticians, including the auction-house denizens upstairs, for whom Marcel might function as the office cafeteria. (The last time I remember seeing this choose-your-own-adventure option was at Four Twenty Five, the Park Avenue power canteen that is, notably, the only somewhat recent opening that matches Marcel for reliable oligarch spotting.)

The menu, from the French chef Marie-Aude Rose, who also runs La Mercerie, is old-fashioned in the au-courant way. A preprandial demi-baguette is laid directly on the tablecloth—no board, no basket, no plate; nothing is chicer, or more exquisite, than exquisite nonchalance. (A puck of butter is complimentary, though you can level up to a smear of Bordier, which, made in Brittany, is reputed to be the best butter in the world, for an extra five dollars, and further loaves of bread will cost you twelve.) Rose plays her Frenchiness to the hilt, with respectable renditions of bistro staples like roast chicken, frogs’ legs, escargot, and a ladylike composition of chilled shrimp and grapefruit supremes. But her kitchen is better when it’s being a little weird. A starter of oeuf mayonnaise features the eggs sliced hasselback-style, their scored openings piped with salty aioli and pink waves of watermelon radish as ruffly and surreal as a pair of nudibranchs. A dish of chilled beef terrine in aspic is more striking still, with cross-sections of carrot and leek arranged in cool geological strata around a layer of cold beef slightly fuzzy with chilled fat. The gelée around it, made with muscat-grape juice and beef consommé, is tart and savory, and a horseradish cream is neatly sharp, if not quite bracing. A scallop crudo is made appealingly strange with smoked crème fraîche and chunky slivers of pickled citrus zest that carry an herbaceous, almost resinous bite.

Still, most of what I tried at Marcel was fairly unremarkable, and a few dishes were downright bleak. Poireaux et Poires Poivrés is a delight to say (God, I love ingredient wordplay), but rather less of one to eat—a loose stack of braised leeks with soft poached pears in a murky, muddy-brown truffle vinaigrette. A boilerplate steak tartare is served with gaufrette chips that are curiously not quite crisp. A main course of poulet au paprika, a nod to Marcel Breuer’s Hungarian origins, is simply a head-scratcher: a deboned leg atop a thin, bitter paprika sauce, with a dollop of sauerkraut and a strewing of raw bell pepper. With its joyless austerity, the dish bears almost no resemblance to actual chicken paprikás, which is boisterous and dense and, crucially, should involve a considerable portion of hearty starches to sop it all up. (A majority of the restaurant’s main courses, notably, eschew carbs.)

Then there is the Lobster Giverny, a Chef Rose invention that’s unique to Marcel, featuring a roasted lobster tail in a stupendous ginger-scented cream sauce built on a base of intense lobster stock, with bits of roast pineapple and tart leaves of nasturtium. What this has to do with Giverny, where Monet lived and painted, I haven't got a clue, but it was the savory menu’s most assured presentation, as pretty as a painting. The cocktails are wonderful, but their vessels are even better: a Kir Royale in a graceful flute with a flared bubble at the bottom, a smoky Rosita in a multi-hued cut-glass tumbler. I’ve been ordering Cosmos everywhere lately—they’re having a moment, and I’m embarrassingly nostalgic—and I nearly fell off my mohaired banquette when Marcel’s version arrived in glassware straight out of a nineties Michael Gravesian fever dream, its bowl tulip-lipped, its stem nearly a foot high.

The real star of a meal at Marcel is dessert, the domain of the pastry chef Rae Gaylord. Her madeleines are baked to order in actual scallop shells, and they arrive still steaming, soft of crumb and barely sweet, with a small pot of tea-scented jam. A dish of pedigreed, ruby-like strawberries comes with a long-legged coupe of Chantilly cream. But this is not a restaurant built for restraint; turn your attentions to Les Grands, a selection of jumbo desserts, each big enough to feed a quorum. There’s an entire salad bowl of chocolate mousse, perfectly bitter and rich, and a Paris-Brest the circumference of a tricycle wheel, with enormous puffs of hazelnut mousse and a dripping seam of blackberry jam. I nearly ordered the mille-feuille, which comes in cinderblock-sized hunks, until a neighboring table caught my companion and me eyeing theirs and pantomimed an emphatic no. Plenty of drama, but apparently less payoff. On my way out, I paused to admire a sixty-seven-million-year-old T. rex tooth that rests in a glass case by the door: it’s yours to purchase at auction, for an estimated forty to sixty thousand dollars, in Sotheby’s upcoming Natural History sale. There’s something refreshing, in a resigned sort of way, about finding yourself in a restaurant that knows the value of everything—and the price, too. ♦