A Brutalist masterpiece, a rejected restaurant. (Photo by Annie Armstrong.)
Two weeks ago, my former colleague Matthew Schneier panned Marcel, the restaurant in the (former Met, now Sotheby’s) Breuer building, created by the auction house and Roman and Williams. (Roman and Williams’ Stephen and Robin Alesch, who also own La Mercerie, took part in designing the menu, branding, and choosing the rotating art that decorates the walls.) “Whether Marcel succeeds as a high-end showroom of art and objets—the best seat in the house is a corner banquette beneath a large, fabulous Joan Mitchell canvas from 1956—I’m not equipped to say,” he writes. “As a restaurant? The spirit of brutalism compels me to be brutal: It fails.” Ouch!
I’m not equipped to say anything about Marcel, because I haven’t been in. But, I do feel equipped to talk about the disagreement in the comment section. There’s plenty of action on the Instagram post, and of course someone (in this case, Sotheby’s International Realty France CEO Alexander Kraft) invoking Ratatouille’s Anton Ego. When lashing out at a critic, this is roughly as clever as referencing Cheers when describing the bar where you know a few people. “It seems the writer knows as much about true, authentic French bistro cuisine than art or architecture - very little !” Kraft hit back.
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