POINT OF VIEW.(The Talk of the Town)(The View restaurant at the Marriott Marquis reopens)

Last spring, the owners of The View, Manhattan's only revolving restaurant, which is at the top of the Marriott Marquis in Times Square, shut the place down to repair what had come to seem a serious problem. "People were just sitting at their tables and looking straight out," Olvia Demetriou, the architect who oversaw a four-million-dollar renovation, said the other day. "After the long journey"--the restaurant occupies the forty-seventh through forty-ninth floors and looks out on three hundred and sixty degrees of midtown--"all you had at The View was really the view. When you arrived, it was downright depressing. There was rug art as the entry feature wall. There was this white kind of popcorn spray-on treatment on the walls."

"Think of the entire hotel's being designed in the nineteen-seventies and opened in the eighties," Kathleen Duffy, the hotel's publicist, said as she led a tour. "It was burgundy colors, brass, lots of mirrors." Members of the staff piped up with other incriminating details: a tatty carpet, hideous upholstery. Kevin Prendergast, the hotel's executive chef, was more succinct. "Nasty," he muttered.

The new decor (aubergine carpet, poppy-colored leather, a silver beaded curtain), however, raised another obstacle: the food at The View would have to compete with the interior, which competes with the view. "We don't want to have a reputation for bad food," Prendergast said. Someone asked if that had been the case before. Another chef, standing behind his boss, frowned and nodded.

The revolving mechanism is one of the few original features that remain. It has never broken down, knock wood. (In the new space, one can choose among cherry, ebony veneer, and some vestigial maple.) The engine--three-quarter horsepower, roughly equivalent to that of a Cuisinart--is underneath the floor at the center of the restaurant, which revolves at the just perceptible rate of one full turn every ...