NEW YORK – When your ears pop on the lift ride up, that is how you know you have arrived at The View, the revolving bar and restaurant on the 47th and 48th floors of the New York Marriott Marquis.

On a recent Saturday evening, the restaurant thrummed with families, groups of friends and couples sipping champagne and devouring seafood towers as they admired the changing skyline. Every 45 minutes, just enough time to leisurely imbibe a cocktail, the lounge makes a full rotation.

Opened in Times Square in 1985 and closed in 2020, The View is the latest in a string of rotating restaurants to make an unlikely return, this one shepherded by restaurateur Danny Meyer and architect David Rockwell.

Gone are the outdated pleather dining chairs and gaudy carpet, replaced by blue velvet banquettes, a black marble bar and elegant Art Deco-style glass installations.

“This is one of the best views,” said Mr Joseph Mirrone, a former New Yorker who had stopped by with his son for a post-theatre coffee and dessert. “You can sit in one spot and the whole city revolves around you.”

Mr Meyer, who has his own warm childhood memories of Stouffer’s Top of the Riverfront, a revolving restaurant in St Louis, was eager to update the form. “When Marriott approached us, it felt like, okay, well, that’s something we’ve never done before,” he said. “When else is someone going to say, ‘Would you like to do a revolving restaurant in the theatre district?’”

Revolving restaurants are widely regarded as novelties, relics of the 1960s and 1970s, when skylines surged ever higher and architects wanted to give the public a front seat to the rapid development happening around them.

La Ronde, a restaurant above the Ala Moana shopping centre in Honolulu, was the first in the US, opening to the public in 1961. Its architect, Mr John Graham Jr, best known for his work on the Space Needle in Seattle, patented the design. It required the construction of a wheeled turntable that could move around a stationary core, like a train on rails.

The restaurant inspired countless imitators, in cities large and small, with names that alluded to their singular party trick: the Changing Scene, in Rochester, New York; the Spindletop, in Houston; the Eagle’s Nest in Indianapolis; and the Summit, in Detroit, all promised a dining experience unlike any other.

Architect John C. Portman Jr incorporated them into a handful of the hotels he designed in Atlanta, Los Angeles an...