Morrell Wine Bar and Cafe

Morrell Wine Bar & Cafe kept a secret under its wooden floor: a huge brass eagle, the emblem of American Airlines, whose ticket counter had the space before the wine bar did¹. The bar grew out of a wine shop that Samuel Morrell and his wife, Charlotte, founded on East 49th Street in 1947².

By 1998 the shop's lease was running out when Rockefeller Center came calling: Tishman Speyer had just bought the complex from Mitsubishi and wanted to bring New Yorkers back to it¹. Morrell became a side-by-side operation on the plaza, the wine store on the left and the wine bar and café on the right¹. Roberta Morrell designed the snug room around an undulating front bar pushed hard against the window, because, she said, you can talk to everyone on a curved bar¹.

It opened with 100 wines by the glass, remarkable at the time, and soon NBC employees and editors from Simon & Schuster and Macmillan were in for lunch two or three times a week¹. By 2003 Time Out New York was calling it a classic, a comfort as wine bars proliferated faster than Duane Reades¹. In 2011 Edible Manhattan named it a founding father of the city's relatively young wine-bar world, a 12-year-old wine bar run by a 63-year-old wine store, still packing in tourists and locals most nights across from the skating rink¹.

Time Out still listed it overlooking Rockefeller Plaza in 2017, with one of the largest selections of wines by the glass in the five boroughs³. By 2023 it had closed, and there were no plans to reopen it². What took its place on the plaza, we couldn't find out.