RESTAURANTS : The $20-Million Rainbow Is as Good as a Pot of Gold

The perfect Hollywood restaurant has just opened in New York. “It’s like being in the movies,” says mastermind Joseph Baum. “These days, people are looking for a little relief.”

In this case, you spell relief RAINBOW --the most glamorous, luxurious and, at more than $20 million, most expensive restaurant ever built in the United States.

The Rainbow Room, open barely 3 months, has already received dozens of rave reviews. It is a restaurant to dream about, a place where two bands play continuously while the dance floor revolves and New York City shimmers 65 stories below. It’s a tasteful Disneyland for grown-ups--walk in the door and you walk right into Fantasyland.

1932 was not a good year. People all over America were depressed; 13 million were out of a job. John D. Rockefeller Jr. was undaunted. In an extraordinary gesture, he put 75,000 people to work building the center he named for himself. He intended it to be the premier business address in the world, and he built it to prove that he had confidence in the country.

Two years later, he went even further. On Oct. 3, 1934, he crowned his complex with the Rainbow Room. Everybody who was anybody came to the opening--and they kept coming for the next 50 years. It was a posh place with slick silk walls and glistening chandeliers. Big bands beat out the music while the dance floor slowly turned.

It was more than just a glittery spot for glamorous people. The power lunch was invented here. During the day, the Rainbow Room turned into the Rockefeller Center Club, a private place where big-time businessmen looked at the tiny people walking 65 floors below and decided their fates. Never had power and glamour come together in quite so potent a manner. It was the top of the world.

But as the decades went by, the Rainbow started to fade. The bands got smaller. The floor no longer revolved. The Big Apple grew up, and suddenly 65 stories didn’t seem so high. Even the food started going downhill. Two years ago, the Rainbow Room closed.

It was only temporary. For David Rockefeller had decided to bring back glamour--and to do it in the style of his father. He brought in the foremost restaurateur in the country. He hired Hugh Hardy, an architect famous for bringing old buildings back to life. He got world-famous graphic artist Milton Glaser to design the place, a Broadway designer to costume the waiters--and a team of top curators to spend $1 million on art. Every one of these people saw it as the chance of a lifetime.

Hugh Hardy looks bored. The Empire State Building dead-center in his view, he glances impatiently at his watch, says a bit irritably, “I don’t have much time,” and begins to quickly recount how he went about renovating the Rainbow Room.

“Our triumph,” he says, “was to bring back to the room the type of life it was built for.” You can tell this is something he has said before. “You have to have tradition,” he goes on, gesturing around him. “But you can be imprisoned by it if you don’t interpret it, reinvent it. And that’s what all this represents.” He talks of verticals and horizontals. He tells how he raised the room 18 inches to take advantage of the view, which had been previously blocked by a parapet. He gestures at details. His voice never loses its even tone.

I look down at the buses below me and I suddenly remember something. When I was a kid, I never passed Rockefeller Center without a lift of the heart. I’d look out the window of the Fifth Avenue bus, across the promenade to the skating rink, up at the building behind it, and it all seemed like a promise of good things to come. What I say is, “I’ve always thought this was one of the best American buildings.”

Hardy looks at me. “Really?” he says. He begins to look interested. “You know, when I was in school, we were systematically taught that this building was a dog. It wasn’t honest. It had its steel frame covered in stone. It had . . . ugh . . . decoration .”

His voice has lost its languor. “But in the last 10 years, all of the tyranny of the International style was taken away by different kinds of ideas about what architecture is. It’s not a machine for living in. Now we understand that architecture is as much about dreams and myth as it is about physical reality.”

Hardy stops looking at his watch and starts romping through the rooms, showing off his favorite details. “I could recite to you every square inch of what these building look like. I’ve always loved them. I know them by heart. So you can imagine the pleasure of actually architecting something here.”

Looking at what Hardy has created, you can actually see the excitement. This is no restoration; this is something far better. For Hardy has gone over the Rainbow and, although he certainly won’t say so, the room in its heyday couldn’t hold a candle to the way it is today.

“It’s essential, when you travel 65 floors in the air, you don’t get off the elevator and find a let-down. It used to be that you’d get off the elevator and find yourself in an office corridor, and your heart sort of went uunh . Now there’s a very clear colonnade; it’s a device to make you anticipatory, to make you feel that something important’s about to happen. And indeed it is, and does.”

Even the bathrooms are fabulous. Hardy has designed chairs and tables; he has built sideboards. He consulted on the lighting. He even built the curving wooden bar.

Hardy runs his hands sensuously across the bar’s laminated surface. “I love all this curvy-wurvy stuff. You know, in the old bar, you sat facing away from the view.” He grimaces at the sheer stupidity of it. “From the very beginning, one thing I really wanted to do was to smash the bar right against the glass. You see, it’s a curving figure that is incomplete, which I think gives you a feeling of being catapulted into the view.” He looks past the bar and catches sight of the sinking sun. He gives a startled exclamation.

“I’ve really got to go,” he cries. “I just have time to change into formal clothes and come back.” He smiles fondly. “Some friends are having a 50th anniversary. We’re bringing them here. Don’t you think it’s the perfect place?”

Milton Glaser looks bored. He has said it all a million times before. “I did all the in-between stuff,” he says. “between the forms and the cracks as it were.” He is charming and friendly, but you can sense that he is not interested in doing one more interview about how he designed the service plates, or why he decided to bring theatrical designer Carrie Robbins in to design the uniforms. “I think they sort of give a new kind of definition to what uniforms can look like in a contemporary restaurant.”

Then he talks about the art committee. “The Rockefellers were very nervous that everything we bought under the heading of art would be significant and not trivialize their reputation or the center’s. So we put together this three-star committee (Henry Geldzahler, former Cultural Commissioner of New York; William S. Lieberman of the Metropolitan Museum; and William Rubin of the Museum of Modern Art) who were consultants on all choices.”

I tell him that I think some of the choices were strange--and rather wonderful. He looks more interested. “Which?” he asks. I mention the ultra-modern Nancy Graves sculpture that greets you when you get off the elevator. “Yes,” he says. “You see, we put together a package for each location. We actually delivered most of them to the site--at great cost--so they could be seen. To

everyone’s surprise, the Graves looked wonderful in that spot.”

This spirit is part of what makes the Rainbow Room so extraordinary. Says Glaser, “I didn’t want the place to look like a period museum of American modernism. I wanted to produce a range of qualities with the art that would sometimes fit and sometimes not fit.”

Now Glaser has warmed to his subject. He begins to talk glowingly of his favorite detail, the sculptural glass wall that Dan Daily produced for the Rainbow Room. “It’s the only new element in the room. And now when you go in you look up and it looks like it had to be there always. There used to be a blank wall there. Now you look at it and you think, if that wasn’t there before, it should have been.”

Joseph Baum does not look bored. The word is not in his vocabulary. The man who created the Four Seasons, Windows on the World, La Fonda del Sol and what seems like every other ground-breaking restaurant of the last 30 years in New York has found his favorite project.

“I love coming to work,” he says. “When I walk across that plaza with the flags snapping and the skating going on--talk about a perk. It’s so juicy, I feel like I’m coming to play.”

And as he roves around the Rainbow, it is clear that he means it. For Baum, this was more than a mere business proposition; he wanted to prove something about the way things were. “People write about restaurants before the present age of youth. But I was in New York in the late ‘40s and ‘50s. It wasn’t a complete wasteland. There were nice places to go. Good restaurants. I thought the idea here was to recognize tradition and provide it with some of the energy that is contemporary.”

Lobster Thermidor. Tournedos Rossini. Pommes souffles. Dishes from the Marguery, the Colony. Buckets of champagne and heaps of caviar. Baum has even brought back Baked Alaska, which makes a triumphant appearance in the dining room as a ball of fire. There are modern dishes too--warm salads of quail and foie gras, shrimp sauteed with artichokes and olives--but you wonder why anybody would bother to order them. On this menu, they seem rather dowdy. “The room,” says Baum happily, “requires a little bit of innocent theatricality.’

And some that is not so innocent: Consider the cocktail. “The Rainbow Room opened the year after Prohibition was repealed,” says Wine Master Fred Price, “and we found that people then were drinking two things: Champagne and cocktails.” Cocktails like Between-the-Sheets (brandy, rum, Cointreau and lemon), the Twentieth Century (gin, Creme de Cacao, Lillet and lemon) and the Clover Club (gin, Chambord and lemon). “These old drinks are very unforgiving,” says Baum’s partner, Michael Whiteman. “The new drinks are all juice and sugar, but these are all alcohol with a little bit of citrus. They are hard to do.”

But the results are worth it. There is nothing quite like sitting up in that beautiful room watching the city twinkle all around as you drink one of those cocktails, listen to the band and watch the dancers go round. From time to time, you take another bite of food. Some of the dishes have a wonderful wickedness--steak tartare topped with caviar, or lobster Thermidor of almost unbelievable richness. The desserts, like the frozen praline souffle topped with hot chocolate sauce, are a dream. It is quite a way to while away an evening.

And patrons do while it away. “People stay here a minimum of three hours--they often stay all evening,” says Baum. “That’s what this place is about.”

He looks happily about him; the place has a mellow hum, like a party that is going well. People here look happy. Baum gives a little skip. “What I like so much,” he says, “is watching people dance up the steps a little bit. Because when they come here, everybody plays. Here the reality is the fantasy; coming here is just like going to the movies.”

The Rainbow Room, 30 Rockefeller Plaza, New York City; (212) 632-5000. Open for dinner only, Tuesday-Saturday. Dinner for two, food only, about $100. Entertainment charge: $8 per person Tuesday-Thursday, $12 Friday and Saturday.