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‘You can’t taste the view” is the cliché about top-floor restaurants. But at strange new Korean extravaganza Gaonnuri, it goes down like a perfectly stirred Manhattan.
While romantic slobs like me pray for the Rainbow Room to reopen one day, Gaonnuri more than satisfies our skyline-dining craving. It’s the year’s most unlikely new eatery by a mile: a Korean jumbo on the top 39th floor of a nondescript office building at K-Town’s western corner of Broadway and 32nd Street.
Its dinner menu is so complicated, you might want your lawyer. It’s pricier than K-Town’s 24/7 joints. Korean jugs on bar shelves lend the only trace of exoticism to a 250-seat, generic hotel-like setting.
But until chef Tae Goo Kang’s kitchen has time to settle in (it opened a week ago), what matters is the view through 16-foot-high windows facing east, north and west. Amazingly, until now, the floor never had any windows at all.
You don’t have to be a commercial real estate maniac to dig the spectacle of Midtown from this lofty new perch. The Empire State Building seems close enough to touch. Gaily-lit newer towers — the New York Times, One Bryant Park, 4 Times Square and the Setai Hotel — glitter like preening starlets in the night sky.
Manhattan’s only surviving high-floor restaurant, The View at the Marriott Marquis — where the view is diluted by two layers of glass as the circular floor rotates inside a square — is too touristy to stomach.
Skyline glimpses from lower floors can still be found at Porter House, A Voce Columbus and Robert at the Museum of Arts & Design — but none has the sweep and drama of Gaonnuri. (212-971-9045)
Neither did the Rainbow Room: Its romantic mood had more to do with art deco furnishings than its view, which was hemmed in by narrow windows and columns.
Gaonnuri’s magic is all through the glass. A neutral palette of white oak and pine isn’t atmospheric, but the setup affords fine views from almost every table, including from a raised central section ringed by a spacious bar and in booths around the bar’s curved perimeter.
Each table is equipped with a gas-flame grill. As at most Korean places, you “cook” many dishes yourself. If you’re new to it, the charming waitstaff will walk (and stir) you through a menu ranging from pan-fried noodles and meat served with traditional banchan sides to a jillion barbecue, hot pot and bibim bap (mixed rice) combos.
Some dishes are as little as $12, but you’ll pay up to $33 for “single choice” seng galbi (short ribs) barbecue and $100 for “Course A” — “Salad and jook will be served with mul kimchi before your course starts, and you can choose one each from #3 Korean barbecue/#4 rice with jigae or cold noodle.”
Gaonnuri’s story began 10 years ago when owner Andy Sung, an architect, was asked to design offices for a Korean bank on the 37th floor of 1250 Broadway.
The view blew him away.
“I asked about putting a restaurant” on a vacant high floor, but the landlord wasn’t interested, he recalled.
South Korea-born Sung, who’s operated several delis but never a restaurant, didn’t give up his dream of a sky-high, “authentic” Korean eatery. And one with fresher air: “A lot of places have a smell” from so much tabletop barbecue. “It’s embarrassing,” he said.
Two years ago, Sung’s real estate broker told him that the tower’s new owners, Jamestown and Murray Hill Properties, were willing to relocate mechanical equipment on the 39th floor to elsewhere in the building.
“At the time, the walls were all concrete, 100 percent cinder block,” Sung says with a smile. He convinced the owners to sign a restaurant lease with him. They spent $2 million putting in windows on three sides — part of what Sung estimates as a total $5 million to $6 million opening cost.
Sung needs to fill a lot of seats to pay rent of more than $1 million a year. It’s been busy at lunch, but was near-empty one night last week.
The bustling block’s pa jun and bulgogi enthusiasts will need to warm to a dining room reached by elevator from the security-mad lobby of an office building that’s home to Visiting Nurse Service.
A street-level sign announces the restaurant. But I had to give my name at the desk for a dinner reservation. How will they handle walk-ins who just want a drink in the lounge? — a great way to check out the place while they work out the kinks.
And while the service is a lot friendlier than at 32nd Street’s rougher-edged joints, the block’s 24/7 crowd might find Gaonnuri a denatured experience, with downdraft grill ventilation to keep the air smoke-free.
But my first meal — scorching-hot squid bokkeum and a merrily bubbling seafood hot pot laden with giant shrimp, lobster, black cod, oysters, clams and mussels — was good enough to distract me from the view. For a minute.