Restaurant review, The Lincoln Dining Room.

Who beamed us aboard the Starship Enterprise?” muttered one of the suburban voyagers at my table as we waited for our cocktails to arrive at Lincoln Ristorante, the dazzling postmodern dining palace that opened earlier this fall at the northern end of the newly refurbished Lincoln Center. Peering from our darkened corner banquette, we could see all sorts of strange, unearthly sights. Unlike the stylish, dungeonlike restaurants downtown, this one was as big as a private-jet hangar and sheathed largely in glass. The gleaming, state-of-the-art kitchen was also partially glass-enclosed, and manned, like the deck of Captain James T. Kirk’s starship, by some of the universe’s top talent, led by Thomas Keller’s famously cerebral, Spocklike former lieutenant Jonathan Benno, dressed in crisply pressed chef’s whites. The ceiling was covered in polished mahogany and canted at dramatic angles like a great sweeping strip of origami, and all around us, as we sipped our $14 Negronis, the huge white theater buildings glittered and glowed like giant planets in the evening sky.

This kind of theatrical spectacle has been a dim memory lately, in this burger-ravaged, postcrash metropolis. So you have to give the proprietors (the giant Patina Restaurant Group, in tandem with Lincoln Center) credit for thinking on such a grand, even majestic, scale. Unlike other ambitious New York restaurants of recent vintage, this 50-table operation isn’t housed in an old meatpacking plant, or a battered Brooklyn townhouse, or in the back of a formerly posh hotel. It resides in its own multilevel, $20 million “pavilion,” outfitted from scratch (by the architectural firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro, which also oversaw the Lincoln Center renovation) with a marble bar and three separate dining sections—one by the kitchen; one facing south, overlooking the theater spaces; and the other to the west. The wine tower, too, is made with glass, the chairs are covered in cream-colored faux leather, and if you wish to digest your meal in a more bucolic atmosphere, you can do that on the roof, which is covered in a carefully manicured meadow of grass.

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