But for the occasional escapist dinner experience there is no beating Gaonnuri, a vast lounge-style restaurant floating high over Thirty-second Street that serves quite tasty Korean fare and offers impressive views of Manhattan — though it doesn't actually feel like it's in Manhattan.
Indeed, it still serves afternoon tea (scones and finger sandwiches, Earl Grey or traditional), the service is impeccable, there are vast lounges from which to watch the world go by and, set in neat landscaped gardens facing the sea.
We sit in a corner of the vast departure lounge.
A popular place for viewing was the vast Panorama Lounge, right over the bow, with picture windows from floor to ceiling.
The vast lobby lounge — furnished with Oriental carpets, antique globes and a casual but studied mix of Danish modern style furniture and local antiques — came off as an engaging postmodern riff on an old-world men's club, the kind of place where Bruce Chatwin might have hung out.
PAY no attention to the vast basement lounge beneath the dining room at Kenmare, with its leather banquettes and cool, mottled plaster walls, its built-in D.J. booth and low lighting, its long hallway of mirror-lined restrooms quite the right size to fit a couple of consenting adults.
BA's regular business/silver-card-holder lounges at Heathrow (and at JFK) are uncommonly good, but the vast Concorde Room lounge beats them to pieces.
Outside the elevator, a sandwich board announces the presence of the restaurant down a nondescript hallway that opens onto a vast bar and lounge.
On a Thursday night there are about 400 people in the main lounge, a vast liver-coloured space, brightly lit and oddly hushed.
CLYDE FRAZIER'S WINE AND DINE This vast restaurant, bar and lounge pays homage to the former New York Knicks guard-turned-sportscaster. It highlights his sartorial splendor with ceiling panels representing some of his 125 or so brightly patterned suits, and his career, with a wood-paneled room equipped with a hoop and regulation foul line that diners will be able to use.
