I just can’t be blasé about Windows on the World.

         “Spectacular” as an adjective limps from abuse but spectacular it is. I admit I was faintly uncomfortable with the headline writer’s hyperbole on New York Magazine’s cover this past May. “The Most Spectacular Restaurant in the World” it boomed in a color close to raw chicken liver. The truth is, I’ve scarcely begun to explore the world. Never dined in a raja’s palace or overlooking an African game preserve. Who knows what dazzling splendors await at tables in Bahia or Istanbul or even the Tivoli Gardens? But spectacular,yes. We called Joe Baum “brilliant” and his fierce creation on the 107th floor of the fiercely despised World Trade Center “a masterpiece,” two words that now, in hindsight, I do not retract or even mildly regret.

         Still, the raw-chicken-liver-hued declaration on our cover was perhaps somewhat bold for a restaurant not yet open to the public. The commissary was chaos. The kitchen was still shaking down. High up in my story I observed that the staff was willing but green, sweetly confused, and the food…merely good. “Perhaps some day it will be very good,” I wrote. “Perhaps it never will.” Such a small note of warning and criticism was, I suspect, easily overlooked by some readers in the fever of enthusiasm.

         Windows never got the chance to quietly shake down and find its own strengths. Instant success was intoxicating, and a handicap. Overnight, the restaurant was filled. There was a fast million dollars in private-party bookings. Soon, a four-week wait for a table. Now dinner is booked up five weeks ahead, the weekends spoken for months in advance. Quickly, letters of complaint began to arrive on my desk. Readers raged about rudeness, out-of-order telephones, confusion over dress codes, disappointing food, arrogant reservation clerks, buffets too quickly devastated, the outrageousness of booking so far ahead, a litany of insult provoked by success that was too fast, too overwhelming. It was scarcely a climate for thoughtful development, seasoning, improvement. But the neglected and disappointed diner was legitimately in a snit.

       Now, five months later, the restaurant is still unfinished. The staff is still primitive and green. The pressure of crowds is still traumatic. The kitchen still struggles. The menu is imaginative but too many items are more interesting in the concept than in the mouth. With intelligence and luck you may dine very well. Without, you may be disappointed. Still, a dozen visits later, I cannot be blasé about Windows on the World. With all its flaws, it remains a spectacular experience.

       There is no point in pretending I am not treated as if I were the Queen of England at Windows. Even the pages greet me by name. On a day when the house was booked up four weeks in advance, (I phoned anonymously to check) a window-side table was waiting for me with a few hours’ notice. (The World Trade Center did not invent the outrage of VIP pampering but does not discourage it.) The intimate front parlor had been reserved so that a friend and I could sip champagne, nibble tiny jewel-like olives, and watch a breath-taking sunset. A page guarded our privacy outside the door. The stereo oozed Mantovani. The good ship Elizabeth inched by 1,310 feet below. And New Jersey was iridescent under streaks of molten pink.
 
       Even then, yes, even with the edges of reality blurred by my favorite queen-of-England fantasy, I could see the problems, measure the distance from perfection. After sunset, in the icy chill at our table overlooking fairy-tale Manhattan, a waiter draped a tablecloth over my shoulders to muffle the air-conditioning blast, invoking Sir Walter Raleigh images. But not even Sir Walter Raleigh, not Joe Baum in dignified attendance – not even restaurant director Alan Lewis himself importuning the chef to transcendent efforts – produced the superlative meal I’d hoped for.

       Perhaps it is asking too much to expect serious, great cuisine in a restaurant as large and complex as Windows. Perhaps it is already a triumph that one eats as well as one does in a house that serves up to 2,400 people a day. Windows’ scheme is truly ambitious. It caters to club members from noon to three with sauna, masseur, and valet; it welcomes after-work drinkers and tourists in the bar, where a small band plays sedate music and where rather expensive hors d’oeuvre are turned out by Japanese, Indonesian, Chinese, and Scandinavian cooks; it provides for two or three separate seatings in the restaurant, as well as handling banquets, meetings, promotional lunches, screenings, and seminars. Yet the exhilaration of exploring New York through the zoom lens of this giant’s eye does not fade.

        One Sunday afternoon: The light is magic, startling, clear, outlining the city in black crayon. Few restaurant dining rooms can take the full force of sunlight. But this room is even more beautiful by day. There are some small touches too clever for me: the shocking-pink velvet casing that warms brass railings here and there in the dining room; gold leaf on glass doors; the painting of fire in air at one corner of the Grill. But the whole is a triumph, reflecting Baum’s passion for quality, the WTC’s courage to go for broke, and interior architect Warren Platner’s sophisticated sensibility and masterful organization of space.

       The waiters, Baum’s recruitment of eager amateurs, are as eager as ever and as amateur. Our captain is unnaturally cheerful, unabashedly proud to wait table, clearly wowed to work here. He stalks me stalking the buffet, waiting to carry my plate back to our table. The cynic in me is surprised and pleased to see him do precisely the same routine for a man at the next table. The room is full of brunchers. Sartorial niceties surrender slightly to Sunday. Impossible to gauge the gastronomic-happiness quotient as they ravage the Grand Buffet. “Eat-all-you-can” has a way of releasing bizarre gluttony in even a discriminating mouth. Think what mayhem we commit at the hideously banal salad bars that pockmark the pop restaurant scene. But for me, the “Grand Buffet Table” is a puzzling disappointment. How lavish it seems, and how classy – a handsome custom table, almost a sculpture, as pricey as a small Rolls-Royce. And what a delectable idea, to make a meal of a hundred tiny tastes.

       The sampler is international: guacamole, Japanese noodle salad, herring in mustard, seviche, clams in aspic, soused shrimp, Madagascar lemon relish, onions Monegasque. There is always an elegant turkey-apple salad, a terrine, apple-wood-smoked chicken, trays of cold meats and sausage, and a choice of two hot dishes: braised breast of lamb, lamb stew, veal stuffed with spinach, pork loin with prunes, or a chicken curry. But many of the meats are dry, sauces taste weary, the salads are too gently seasoned, the vinaigrette is bland, such picnic classics as potato salad and tuna-and-beans are undistinguished, and the aspics are invariably rubbery. Mustard, capers, fresh herbs, pepper and salt, precision in timing, less gelatin… all would help. The juxtaposition of exotic against homely familiar is an attempt to please everyone and a compromise doomed to insult more demanding palettes. But the cuisinary faithful are an inconsequential tribe, I fear, and scarcely crucial to a restaurant expected to gross over $10 million in its first year.

        The menu keeps more promises. Trimmer now than when Windows first went public, and more expensive – the $13.50 prix-fixe dinner now costs $16.50 – it has boasted lyrical à la carte matings: cheese-and-crab soufflé in a tomato; pike-and-spinach pâté; corn-and-crab soup, mignonettes of veal with crayfish sauce; baby eggplant grilled with soy and ginger; and Atlantic salmon in red wine. Alas, just heeding the whims of your appetite is not scientific enough to ensure that you dine well. My broker takes her mouth more seriously than almost anyone I know. Preparing for a meal at Windows, she read my earlier article twice, she said, and “knowing what a fussbudget Joe Baum is,” assuming all basic products would be the very best, she chose simple cooking done at the last minute, then bullied most of her companions to go along. The result: “A wonderful meal… a meal so much better than I had a right to expect.”

        Her perception and experience confirmed my own random wanderings through the menu. The kitchen has a fine hand with fish, an almost Oriental finesse, more delicate than the French. Braised lettuce-wrapped bass, charcoal grilled bluefish with toasted sesame, stuffed trout baked in a tender pastry wrap, scallops en brochette sensitively snatched from the fire at precisely the right moment, red snapper impeccably steamed with vegetables… all were impressive. Côte de boeuf – a thick slab of prime rib – was rare, tender, peppery. Rack of lamb ordered rare arrived rare – tender young lamb needing only salt. The lunchtime English cut of roast beef looked “an awful lot like dog food on my plate,” as my friend the Texas redneck observed, but the meat itself was excellent, the horseradish cream irresistible. Neither the mignonettes of veal nor the crayfish sauce napped round them had any flavor, and the duck, crisp from a last-minute browning under the broiler, was a dry, boring bird.

        We tried to get French-fried zucchini – I’d heard it was something of a miracle, crisp and hot in a folded napkin. It didn’t come. Reminded, the waiter said, “Oh, yes…” and disappeared. Perhaps to eat it himself. The zucchini never arrived. The kitchen does make an effort with the vegetables, but the string beans were overdone and the tomato Provençale underdone. The shredded potatoes, thin as angel hair, are exquisite when hot. The house was out of field greens one night, so director Lewis offered red-onion-and-orange salad, adding watercress and bits of black olive in a cumin-spiked dressing. He so liked the addition of watercress that it will go on the new menu for winter, where the most popular dishes are retained and new ones added. Only the freshest fish goes into the sashimi platter ($3.95 at lunch, $4.65 after sunset), garnished with fresh shredded ginger and sharp green horseradish paste, but why not something more adventurous – sea urchin or salmon roe? Why too such predictable sushi?

       The wine list is international, gently reminding us that this is the World Trade Center, but there is a realistic emphasis on French and American wines, all sanely priced (many bottles under $10), and a particularly skillful California selection. Except for an icy pineapple sherbet, desserts are mostly sublime if not celestial. Favorites: lemon tart; deep, dark chocolate pastry cake; elegant rum-and-orange-graced savarin; mango-and-macademia-nut sundae.

       Knowing the perfectionist Joe Baum, I cannot believe he will give up trying to polish the cadets of the dining room and whip the kitchen into more consistent performance. Perhaps there are too many rings in this glorious circus for transcendent cuisine. Possibly the key to juggling so many acts is to abandon the more ambitious fancies that insatiable gourmands dream and tailor all the menu to the strengths of the crew. Buy the best and the freshest… cook it simply, garnish it with taste and wit. Let respect for the ingredients rather than the elusive skill of a saucier create the triumph.

       I wish the food were always dazzling. I wish the captains smiled at everyone as warmly as they smile at me. I wish it weren’t such a crushing task to book a table. I wish someone would find my fried zucchini. But even if Windows never gets better, I’ll keep going, treating friends and out-of-towners to lunch, feeling high at dinner. The rain makes a cave. Sometimes the fog steals the city away. But mostly New York is a splendid miniature – an illuminated toy city. When I’m too blasé for Windows on the World, I’ll know I’m too hopelessly jaded for New York.