HOTEL

 

 

The Mark hotel, on the corner of east 77th street and Madison Avenue in New York City, is unique. That’s not lazy reviewer language, it’s literally unique. There’s only one. At a time when hotel chains have hotel chains, this is a single, privately-owned property. There is no Mark Paris, or Mark Rome. There’s just this.

 

But this is a magnificent hotel, more French-like than even Parisien hotels, which too often feel like they’re trying to be American. I mean, the staff speak English but the place feels French. It’s beautiful and orderly and neat and seamlessly elegant. From the moment you walk through the vigilantly-attended front doors, the shiny black and white lobby floor makes the hotel feel larger and sophisticated, and the small reception and concierge desks give the lobby an intimacy.

 

 

 

 

On a recent late spring stay there the weather was so nice — warm and sunny but not hot — that you could eat lunch outside comfortably, a row of tables lined up along the front edifice, which felt like Paris, unhurried, not cramped, not noisy, as if even the traffic hisses by a little quieter, more respectfully here. The street feels like it belongs to the hotel. (For Manhattan, it is a remarkably less traversed street,)

 

I am not a fan of New York, even though I was born there and spent 38 years there. I don’t even like visiting it, much less staying over. New York used to be interesting, to have a public, street-side personality. It doesn’t anymore. New York, when it’s not flooded, frozen or sauna-sweltering, is, to me, a bland, yuppified human kennel. It’s a place people have to go to as much as want to. It’s a place where people get stuck. 

 

I had to be in New York for two days at the end of April so I stayed at The Mark, having long been curious about it and having spent some pleasant nights at the bar. It was a stellar experience even if, at its prices, it will not be a common one.

 

 

 

 

The rooms are beautiful and thoughtfully designed, comfortable, spacious with gorgeous bathrooms. One of the owners, Izak Senbahar, who is the most involved in the day to day running of the property, once compared, enigmatically, designing a great hotel to baking a chocolate cake. His point is that all the ingredients have to work together: Overall design, the opportunity to provide comfort and all the details expected of a luxury hotel. 

 

 

 

 

It is a quixotic place, with a well frequented gourmet hot dog stand by the front door, and they will arrange for sailboats for you to take on the water of adjacent Central Park. They will get you bicycles, and set up ice skating excursions — those being separate experiences, just to be clear.

 

I happened to stay there the weekend before the Monday evening, within-walking-distance, Met Gala, an event of immeasurable narcissism and preening, which is, nonetheless, the hotel’s economic Superbowl and World Cup rolled into one. My saving grace was that I was gone before it happened. Every member of staff I met couldn’t help but gush about “how excited” they were about it, although I doubt any of them went. The hotel had a red carpet for the celebrities who were going though, and were staying at The Mark. By Saturday afternoon, a flock of media had started to congeal around the mouth of the hotel, to memorialize the arrival of these special people. And identical-looking social media influencers who had booked way in advance, began flowering across the lobby, somehow looking bored and thrilled at the same time.

 

The restaurant at The Mark, known simply but proudly enough as The Mark Restaurant by Jean-Georges, is otherworldly good. That’s Jean-Georges Vongerichten, the Madonna of the food world who only needs to go by one name. He’s Michelin royalty. He designed both the menu and the visually gorgeous restaurant and Michael Hursa is the Executive Chef who actually cooks what you eat. The man deserves his own Michelin statue. I ate there both nights and still, as summer shrinks now, recall both meals fondly. 

 

There are two things I most passionately judge a restaurant by, how they prepare steak tartare and how they cook fish. The steak tartare was delicious, it’s multiple tastes delicate. The fish was sublime. I’m getting hungry reading my own review.

 

The Mark is certainly glamorous, but I don’t see that as the point. Is it ever, really, meaningfully, the point of anything? They have the trappings of glamour, unquestionably, and the prices. The extraordinary penthouse suite retails for $100,000 a night. And it’s booked. Regularly. They declined to tell me exactly how many nights a year, but someone confidentially told me that a guest had just checked out that took it for a month.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Everyone who works there is pleasant and attentive. No-one is surly. The service, the attention you’re given for anything you’ve asked, is immaculate. Everywhere is clean and comfortable. The small front bar off the lobby is cinematic, exquisitely designed and welcoming, something you can’t fake, and, for all its tininess, is never crowded. They make the best whisky sour I’ve ever had. 

 

Perhaps most magically, the hotel is in a half pocket of New York that isn’t broken or stinking. This has to be more than luck, this has to be the hotel’s doing. One is transported to a calm, sensual place literally yards from what everyone knows as Manhattan, bustling, filthy, and an overload of the senses. It’s the sort of hotel where, after you stay there, you wistfully remember the lobby staff, always polite and helpful, and the friendly doormen. 

 

How often does that happen?