When a team set out to build a destination restaurant at the top of the World Trade Center in 1971, lower Manhattan was not exactly a dining hot spot.
Architect Warren Platner envisioned a warm and sensory aesthetic that framed an uninterrupted view. Famed graphic designer Milton Glaser, who would go on to create the city’s famous I ♥ NY logo, defined the restaurant’s visual identity with dishware and matchbooks that pulled from the sky’s palette and used celestial motifs. Glaser’s aesthetic credo for the venue was appropriately grandiose: “A journey to the promised land, an adventure in imagination, the pursuit of the unexpected. New York City’s critics and tastemakers, who had steadily pilloried the World Trade Center, not only embraced Windows on the World—they anointed it. The restaurant, already in need of updating for health ordinances and building codes, shuttered for a three-year renovation. The bustling scene featured three bars and a piano in the middle of the room; the concept carried a markedly younger demographic in mind with a menu that featured now-ubiquitous share plates and global street food like kebabs and dumplings for a hungry, striving clientele. “We served everybody. “It was all day and night. There was no stop.
For several years, Windows would run neck-and-neck with Tavern on the Green as the highest-grossing restaurant in the U.S.; in 2000, its last full year of operations, Windows on the World held the mantle. People used to bring food there and we just served it to police, to the fire department, to people who were helping there,” said former Windows server Fekkak Mamdouh, a Moroccan immigrant who started working at the restaurant in 1996. In early 2002, Mamdouh co-founded the Restaurant Opportunities Center of New York in early 2002 to help former Windows staff members, along with affected downtown service workers in the area, find employment and advocate for higher pay.
“‘Spectacular’ as an adjective limps from abuse, but spectacular it is,” raved New York magazine’s restaurant critic Gael Greene.
