Twenty years ago, Cellar in the Sky was a blind spot, a distraction, a provocative conundrum at the brand new Windows on the World. Imagine, a basement on the 107th floor of the World Trade Center. It seemed like a characteristic ho-ho-ho from Joe Baum, the restaurant master builder hoping to revive his own sagging fortunes as he launched the ambitious Windows complex in the despised twin towers by lyricizing over its unique and spectacular view. All of New York was vying for tables, everyone demanding a window perch. Alas, a chunk at its very core was windowless, eyeless and dead. How to market an inescapable liability? Well, you could advertise it as a thrill. It was an era of oenophilic one-upmanship when Joe and the Baumettes dreamed up the Cellar in the Sky, a room where guests would pay a premium for a fixed and fancy menu, each dish paired with a special wine.

          Bemused by these memories, I am shocked and pleased to see that the Baum team, in its poetic second time around, has found eyes for the reborn Cellar in the form of a southern exposure. This is the best-looking room in the house. True, it’s depressing to step off the elevator after its 64-second heavenward swoosh and be confronted with a sparkly beaded curtain that looks like the backdrop in a Queens banquet hall for the wedding-party portrait.

          But very quickly, a uniformed page rescues me mid-cringe and gestures to a path beyond. An artful pileup of vine-draped wooden wine crates beckons, and we are entering a wooden jewel box, padded in Chinese silk brocade -- red, turquoise, royal blue, and pearl gray. The low-slung ceiling defies its squatness with rich mahogany detail. The calculated dimness plays to the view, an enchantment of dark-blue-velvet sea looking out toward Staten Island, the diamond-studded Verrazano bridge, and the aura of Ms. Liberty.

          And while Saturday Night Fever fashions revived today may seem hopelessly tacky to me, the old Cellar in the Sky premise isn’t at all dated. Never mind that it began at $35, for six courses, five wines, no choices. Now it’s seven courses, five wines, and given today’s inflated dining prices around town, the $125 tariff seems quite reasonable. Perfect for romance and celebration. Milton Glaser’s handsome Bacchus service plate is framed by bare, gleaming wood of modern marquetry. The god’s wink is flirty, not like his cretinous gaze on the sommeliers’ quilted vests. And the kitchen under Marc Murphy is more sophisticated and better than ever. From the first pour of the Veuve Cliquot Brut (bottled to celebrate the house’s twentieth year) with eggs on eggs piled in a hollow eggshell -- buttery scrambled eggs so soft they’re almost hollandaise, salted with a plop of beluga caviar -- the razzamatazz begins.

          This being 1996, the height of New York’s renaissance in baking, there is not only a different wine with every dish but a different bread -- batons of toast with the egg (though that is not a free-form rice cake the eggshell stands in but rock salt bound with egg white, a new medium invented by the chef, much to Baum’s delight). Before the sourdough country loaf appears, a martini glass of knitting-needle-thin bread sticks and oven-dried-tomato-touched flatbread crisps follows the first pour of Meursault. Les Bouches Chères of the Domaine René Manuel, to be as specific as the sommelier is.

          There’s an odd, slightly spicy bite in the Chardonnay meant to complement both a luscious toss of the shellfish and favas on fettuccine in a lobster-tinted cream and the small, pan-seared red mullet in a puddle of celery-flavored butter, its hollow filled with crumbs and herbs moistened with garlic oil. Rich and very rich. Time to slow down a bit, or we aren’t going to make it through the night.

          “And now it’s time for a religious conversion, from white to red,” the wine steward alerts us, pouring the only scant tipple of the night, Château Talbot, from her decanter. “It’s 1989. A great year. I’ve found this to be a killer. Normally, you wait ten years to drink it, but already it’s supple, and I think you’ll like drinking it now.” Indeed.

          Each Cellar minion recites his or her lines, smartly drilled like fifth-graders at a school play. Delivering the squab, the waiter turns the plate, then turns it again -- “Sorry about that,” she murmurs, determined to have the sauce sit at some regimented latitude, I suppose -- then announces: “Squab on squab-and-shallot confit with grilled foie gras and black trompette mushrooms and late-harvest corn in a cabbage purse.” We are awestruck, if not numbed, and probably a bit drunk. But still sensitive enough to appreciate the dazzle -- rosy bird, the liver just a shade too cooked, the oniony nest sweetly caramelized. As for the complex and warming Talbot, it’s gone in a flash, and the steward is uncorking another bottle, an expensive gesture I hope she might extend to any anonymous client as well as a to a recognized critic.

          Of course, we feel obliged to taste the Dominus, a Cabernet from the Napa vineyard now owned by Christian Moueix, lord of the vaunted Château Pétrus. It’s meant to be sipped with fresh pear slices and a pride of American farmstead cheeses -- Muscoot, Hudson, Amram, intensely sharp cheddar -- but we’re not willing to surrender the Talbot.

          It’s almost midnight (we arrived 45 minutes late for our reservation), so the dramatic pause before the dessert built into the choreography seems a torture. Though admittedly in pain, I find sensational port-poached figs with vanilla ice cream an elegant finale, but the poppy-seed mousse is a gaffe, as are the third-rate sugared madeleines piled under an excellent almond tuile draped like a drop cloth. Well, it is Cellar’s first night. Plenty of time to reformat a few cookies. And if the kitchen can stay on its toes, there will be reason enough for New Yorkers to rediscover the high-flying Cellar.

          Incredible as it may seem, in the dark ages of SoHo there was a time when you couldn’t buy Thai orchids at midnight, much less milk. Pioneers who date from those days suffer the insult of fast-creeping gentrification, and some of my artist friends were apoplectic when Emanuel Stern, dauphin of the Hartz Mountain Industries pet-food fortune, got the city’s nod to build the first new hotel in SoHo since the 1800s. No matter how cleverly architect David Helpern tried to mimic the cast-iron neighbors, the SoHo Grand’s redbrick setback rises like a penal institution for fifteen stories, blotting out the light for some. For some reason, I expect a loutish inn. Nothing quite prepared me for how stylish and winning it is.

          No surprise to find a seventeenth-century French birdbath filled with water near the entrance -- “It’s the only dog bar in SoHo open 24 hours a day and no reservations,” Stern boasts. And two bronze hounds guarding the stairway are glorious if predictable. Still, the doorman and reception clerks trump the Royalton’s Vietcong pajamas with soft gray flannel jackets that could be Armani over insolent T’s. And the steel-and-brass stairway with its translucent bottle-glass insets suspended from the ceiling by cables is a stunner.

          Massive columns, exposed riveted beams, the wire-inset mirrored ceiling allude to the neighborhood’s industrial legacy. Interior designer William Sofield’s choices of the giant clock and power-blue door at the check-in counter, art works by SoHo artists, and photographs of the city in the thirties through the fifties, the dark outsize sofas and the tusk-footed tables, shout downtown. The floor lamps with the gawky shades require giant weights to keep them from tipping. But in context, it all fits.

          So does the menu of classics that ubiquitous consultant Clark Wolf has worked out for the Canal House with chef David Shack, an émigré from Sign of the Dove. Simple, straightforward, what you might like to find waiting in a hotel dining room after arriving frazzled and late at Kennedy. Perfect fries, tender New York sirloin, a first-rate Caesar, lush crab cakes, an excellent burger with bacon and cheddar are no trick at all for Shack. With light pouring in through muslin curtains framed by chocolate velvet drapes on sixteen-foot windows, and a soft rose glow from copper fixtures on subtle stripe-and-check-wrapped chairs, the dining room has quickly become a retreat for SoHo business lunches. Brunch draws both the neighbors and hotel clientele (indeed, a big breakfast order for one of the suites has captured the kitchen, our waiter warns one Sunday at noon).

          A feisty “merry Bloody Mary” and a pizza make a laid-back lunch. The Grand hero, with a pile of chips, or a lobster-salad sandwich, pasta, or moist roast chicken with pesto potatoes – priced from $8.50-$17 -- send a message of affordable welcome to the neighborhood. Perhaps there could be a few more lean options to balance the creamy richness of New England seafood chowder, the tomato-basil-and-goat-cheese tart, and the molten macaroni in its cheesy crust.

          Many of these icons of Americana are back again at dinner -- sandwiches and entrées, $10 to $27 -- and so are we, but we are almost alone. Now the light from the fixtures high above can’t quite chase the dusk. Votive candles on each table fail to make up the missing wattage. And though everything we’ve ordered pleases -- potato-fennel-asparagus pizza, deep-fried oysters with cuts of cucumber and radish in a horseradish vinaigrette, the Caesar, mellow lobster freed from its shell with chive-mashed potatoes and beet salad, those marvelous fries -- perhaps such finessed pub food at this hour is moot in this precinct.

          For the hopelessly weary, there’s 24-hour room service. But hungry locals are off to their favorite haunts or are pursuing gastronomic epiphany elsewhere. Visiting kin decamp for family reunions. The city’s famed tables beckon. Is it possible that the Canal House may turn out to be essential at lunch and unloved at dinner?