Signs on the inside and outside boast that it's the highest building in the Western Hemisphere, at 1,776 feet. Even if you didn't know much about fine dining, you knew such a dream-like place existed, and you knew that it came tumbling down on September 11, 2001.įourteen years later, One World Trade has risen near the footprints of the felled Twin Towers. Windows was a shining ambassador for New York, an escape from a city that was, in decades past, drug addled, dirty, and crime-ridden below. If anything, Windows helped usher in a new era of captive audience dining in that the restaurant was a destination in itself, rather than a lazy byproduct of the vital institution it resided in. Windows boasted one of the city's finest wine lists, and its sister spot, Cellar in the Sky, was a forerunner in espousing that wallet drainer known as the wine pairing. Or as the food critic Ruth Reichl once noted, the vista was effectively a "magic carpet of lights at your feet." Joe Baum's sky palace, of course, had its non-visual merits too. At Windows, with its panoramic views of the city, "New York was the main course," William Grimes wrote in Appetite City. Sure, you were there to eat, but you were mostly there to watch, to be in awe. To say that an evening at Windows on the World, located on the 107th floor of the World Trade Center's North Tower, was just about the food, would be like saying a Mets game was just about the hot dogs.
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