UPDATE on 9/13/01: The above linked web site now has been pulled.
[This message has been edited by PremEx (edited 09-13-2001).]
CocoaNut
Sep 12, 01, 3:43 am
Oh, Mark, this is so sad ... had a lovely dinner there one evening with my whole family. They were so proud of their classy restaurant and wine cellar, and now it's ... dust.
[This message has been edited by CocoaNut (edited 09-12-2001).]
geo1004
Sep 12, 01, 9:40 am
On my first of several visits to NYC to have steak and wine with the Catman we had several Sam Adam's at WOTW before heading out for dinner. Very sad.
PremEx
Sep 13, 01, 3:02 pm
UPDATE: The above linked web site has now been pulled.
raffy
Sep 18, 01, 6:32 pm
San Francisco lost one of its own not only when former “Boulevard” creative pastry chef Heather Ho left the popular downtown restaurant to become the executive pastry chef at Windows on the World of New York in May, but also when it was discovered that Heather was one of the over 5,000 missing people in the destruction at the World Trade Center.
wigstheone
Sep 19, 01, 9:13 pm
At the World Trade Center, Windows That Rose So Close to the Sun
NEW YORK has many bars and restaurants with views of the city. Windows on the World was something else, a restaurant that seemed suspended halfway between the earth and the moon. From 107 stories, the views extended for 90 miles. Manhattan, Brooklyn and New Jersey spread out in sharply etched detail. The river bridges looked like fragile steel filaments from a quarter mile up, and New York Harbor threw back tiny sparks of sunlight.
Those windows were something else too. They ran floor to ceiling, and intensified the giddy sensation of soaring over Manhattan. Diners lusted after the tables alongside them. They offered the ultimate New York experience, sitting high atop the world's tallest, most powerful city — A-number-one, top of the heap.
It may be merely a footnote to a national calamity, but the collapse of the World Trade Center's two towers ended an era in New York City dining. As a terrorist target, the towers represented American economic power. For hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers, and untold numbers of tourists, it was a place to eat.
From the beginning, Windows on the World, and the busy hive of small food operations down below that fed thousands of workers every day, represented a grand experiment, undertaken at a time when New York's economy had hit rock bottom. Could a vertical city rise over the bent, intertwined streets of Dutch Manhattan? Could its population be fed every day in anything more than the most perfunctory way? And could any one restaurant match the sheer audacity of two 110-story buildings? Improbably, the answer to all these questions was yes.
The human cost is still not known. The two restaurants and bar on the 106th and 107th floors of 1 World Trade Center — Windows on the World, the Greatest Bar on Earth and Wild Blue — employed 450 people. Seventy-nine were on duty Sept. 11, said David Emil, whose company, Night Sky restaurants, operated the complex. Some were doing prep work for the evening, others were serving 500 people at a corporate breakfast seminar. All were still missing yesterday.
The World Trade Center did not start out as a powerful symbol of the city's spirit. At birth, it was reviled as a waste of public money and an architectural monstrosity. If ever a building project had an image problem, the World Trade Center was it.
The change in public perception was brought about by Windows on the World. "It conveyed a level of respectability to what was a vilified complex," said Michael Whiteman, who helped plan the trade center's food operations with the restaurateur Joseph Baum. Within a year of opening, in April 1976, Windows on the World was one of the most talked-about restaurants in New York, and a prime draw for tourists, who lined up to take the 58-second elevator ride to the 107th floor.
The World Trade Center was, in concept, a bureaucratic palace. It was the showcase restaurant, with its commanding views, that came to embody the visionary drive behind the complex. In a city built on risk, the towers and the restaurant that seemed to hover in the sky added up to an almost absurd gamble. "In a way, it was the symbol of the beginning of the turnaround of New York," Mr. Whiteman said. "We were successful because New York wanted us to be successful. It couldn't stand another heartbreaking failure."
I never felt as if I were going to a restaurant when I stepped on the elevators to Windows on the World. The velvet ropes outside the express elevator, and the uniformed attendants who asked your destination, made me feel as if I were being transported to a different world .
Critics were divided about the décor, but I thought it had a shiny, modern, go-ahead quality that suited the city's soul. At the same time, oddly enough, I felt that the view allowed you to see New York afresh, to recapture the way it appeared to Henry Hudson when he first sailed into the harbor on the Half Moon.
Will diners ever again find that perspective enchanting? The very idea of ascending dozens of floors to dine, overlooking the city, seems fraught with peril at the moment. I wonder whether, even with the passage of time, the romance of dining in the sky will ever recapture the public imagination. Exhilaration has now become too closely interwoven with terror.
Windows on the World had a difficult birth. Mr. Baum, the visionary behind landmark restaurants like the Four Seasons and La Fonda del Sol, had parted company with Restaurant Associates, the company he put on the map, when he won the bid to create the restaurants at the World Trade Center. Working with Mr. Whiteman and Dennis Sweeney, an engineer, he hired a team of consultants that included James Beard, Jacques Pépin and Barbara Kafka.
Together they began planning a series of food stands and restaurants that would feed a population big enough for a midsize city, as 150,000 people passed through the complex every day. They created 22 food and drink outlets, all supplied by a central commissary, where deliveries arrived, prep work was carried out and stocks and soups were made. The complex had visual flair, in part because of graphic design by Milton Glaser.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/19/dining/19CENT.html
wigstheone
Sep 23, 01, 8:10 am
Remembering a 'Cellar in the Sky' That Was Atop the Twin Towers
During the 1970s, when we were young and living in Miami, we used to rush out every Wednesday to grab the New York Times just so we could look at an advertisement. It was a small ad on the food page every week, for a restaurant called Cellar in the Sky.
Cellar in the Sky was an odd little space within the fabulous Windows on the World restaurant on top of the World Trade Center in New York. While the rest of the restaurant had magnificent views from the 107th floor, Cellar had no windows. It was, instead, surrounded by the restaurant's wine cellar. It had 35 seats, a private bathroom, its own guitarist and a prix fixe menu. The content of the ad really said it all: It simply listed the five wines being served that week.
Although dinner cost an astounding $45 a person, we were determined to go there and, during our first trip to New York as a couple, we did. We were met at the door with a glass of Wisdom & Warter 1908 Sherry, then moved on to a Muscadet from France, a Cabernet Sauvignon from California and the first well-aged, fine Bordeaux we'd had, a 1966 Chateau Beychevelle. Each wine, poured continuously, was introduced by the wine director, an enthusiastic young man named Kevin Zraly.
We were having the greatest meal of our lives that night, and this didn't escape the notice of a man who seemed to be in charge. He pulled up a seat, lit a cigarette and talked to us for hours. We had no idea that the man, Alan Lewis, was a legendary New York restaurateur and the genius who ran Windows on the World. By the time we finished our dinner, with a remarkable German wine, we knew we'd do anything to live in New York some day.
At least once a year, we visited New York just so we could eat at Cellar. We spent hours and hours over dinner, usually talking with Alan Lewis. It wasn't just a great restaurant with wonderful wines. To us, it was a symbol of everything beautiful and civilized. When we finally moved to New York, we couldn't afford to eat there often, but we'd get there at least a couple of times a year, and for another six months we'd live on the memories of what good wine, good food and good friends can be at the top of the mountain.
It wasn't just our favorite restaurant. It was a place where we felt special, and where we felt the world was a special place. We once spent an entire weekend at the Vista Hotel in the World Trade Center so we could go straight from Cellar to our room.
Mr. Zraly went on to become a famous wine writer, author of "Windows on the World Complete Wine Course," and he trained one famous wine expert after another at Windows, from Ralph Hersom, wine director of New York's Le Cirque 2000, to Andrea Immer, author of the book "Great Wine Made Simple." Windows on the World became a destination for people from all over the world, millions of whom have memories of a quintessential New York experience.
Celebrating Possibilities
When terrorists bombed the World Trade Center in 1993, the building closed, and so did Cellar. Later, Windows opened a new wine-themed restaurant called Wild Blue, which wasn't as intimate but was lovely and fun. The first time we went -- anonymously, we thought -- a bubbly young woman walked up to our table and said to Dottie, "I recognize you from that column in the newspaper about your wedding. You had flowers in your hair." The young woman was Inez Holderness, the new beverage director, whose enthusiasm and South Carolina accent were so different from what many people expect from a sommelier in New York. She introduced us to Windows' famous chef, Michael Lomonaco, and the general manager of Windows, Glenn Vogt, a tall man who almost seemed like a giddy child when he talked about the possibilities on the 107th floor.
It was like old times. Last year, we worked with them to celebrate Open That Bottle Night at Windows. For a week, in honor of the event, people could come to Windows with their own wines, with corkage fees waived. Our company newsletter printed a picture of us talking to one couple who brought a spectacular cult wine from California.
Sunshine on the 107th Floor
Two weeks ago, for the very first time, we took our daughters, Media and Zoe, to Windows on the World for dinner. We had told them about it, probably bored them about it, for years. We had 6 p.m. reservations, and at 5 p.m., a storm blew through Manhattan. We thought about canceling: Why go to the 107th floor when you can't see through the watery haze? But as we took our seats, the clouds parted and the sun shone. Inez and Glenn came over to greet the girls. "You brought the sunshine with you," they told us. As they stood at our table at the window, a rainbow spread before us. It started somewhere around 34th Street in Manhattan and ended in Queens. It was the most vibrant we'd ever seen, and waiters came to our window to look at it.
Inez and Glenn asked us if we'd seen the construction on our way into Windows. Most of the wine, they explained, was held in a wine cellar in the basement of the World Trade Center. They'd decided to move it upstairs. Just at the entrance to Windows, they were building a large, glass-enclosed wine cellar that everyone would pass as they walked in for lunch or dinner. As it happens, they were building it in exactly the same place where Cellar in the Sky used to be. The room was almost finished. They were planning to start moving the bottles into the cellar in a couple of weeks, after Inez returned from her sister's wedding in South Carolina. We jokingly volunteered to help.
For years, Windows on the World sold more wine than any other restaurant in America. It had a spectacular list, with more than 1,500 selections, all of the "first growths" of Bordeaux, great Burgundies, stunning dessert wines, often at surprisingly reasonable prices. Its cellar held around 50,000 bottles. But that night, the wine they were most excited about was a Cabernet Sauvignon from Tomasello Winery in Atlantic County, New Jersey. We ordered it and it was delicious. We're so glad we kept the label, since it's the last we'll have from Windows on the World.
As we left that night, we passed the bar, where we ducked in and were the only couple on the dance floor. Media and Zoe pretended they didn't know us.
Last week, Inez was still in South Carolina, her friends told us. Glenn was driving to work, and sped to the scene after hearing the news on his car radio. A huge piece of metal fell off the roof, and bodies started landing in front of him. "It was a very hopeless situation," he told our colleague Michael Orey. Chef Lomonaco stopped in the lobby of the World Trade Center to get reading glasses instead of getting on the elevator to ride to his office on the 106th floor. That stop saved his life.
[This message has been edited by PremEx (edited 04-23-2003).]
GUWonder
Oct 25, 01, 4:21 am
My first real post-college (on my own hard-earned dime)restaurant experience in NYC was going to Windows on the World. I remember dining there even by myself looking out of the windows and thinking this is NYC, a city like no other, and my home once again. Windows on the World will be missed along with the many, many people whose lives were stolen from them on that fateful day of 9-11-01.
Ironically, every time I went to this wonderful place, it was cloudy outside, drenched with a gray, sad dreariness. And every time I wondered how must this place be on a sunny day?
[This message has been edited by GUWonder (edited 10-25-2001).]
VicOsaki
Oct 31, 01, 3:46 pm
Many years ago, before WOW closed and reopened I invited my wife to be on a trip to NYC. Money was a bit tight, so I took her up to the Cellier for a drink instead of dinner at WOW. She looked longingly at WOW on our way down, so we had the Sunday buffet there. The view was great, and the food certainly was plentiful. I was very proud of myself, eating so much at about a third of the price of WOW's typtical dinner. It all seems like yesterday, but actually, it was twenty years ago.
[This message has been edited by VicOsaki (edited 10-31-2001).]