Photograph by Lauren Lancaster
Photograph by Lauren Lancaster

The happiness of ladies which Zola pinned on the grands magasins is displayed to full effect at Stella 34, a startlingly good restaurant perched on the sixth floor of Macy’s in Herald Square. There’s an express elevator to the trattoria from the building’s nose, at Broadway and Thirty-fifth Street, which bypasses the perfume sellers, the fur salon, the opaque taxonomy of women’s attire (“impulse casual,” “junior misses”). But most of the diners seem to have fully committed to the experience: staggering off the rickety wooden escalator, through the linen department next door, travelling in multigenerational packs whose collective optimism faded two floors ago. Who said shopping was fun, again?

Fortunately, a soothing menu of Italian standards awaits. The executive chef, Jarett Appell, seems to understand what is demanded from the department-store restaurant: nostalgia, fried calamari, chopped salads interesting enough to be entrées. And yet dishes consistently produce yelps of delight from the table, as with a B.L.T. on pagnotelle bread, a blistered house-made pocket of pure crunch. Or the vitello tonnato, dressed with a light tuna-confit vinaigrette rather than with the usual sludgy mayonnaise. Of the pizzas coming out of three wood-burning ovens, the one with cauliflower, cream, and Meyer lemon is the clear winner. (Gratin should always be served on bread.) By dessert, the elegant plating of an almond cake with careful frills of poached pear surprises no one.

There is a single moment of tension, when an order of lobster creste di gallo gets a warning from the waiter. “That’s going to be a little spicy,” he says beneath a furrowed brow. It’s not, really, but he was right to say so, because the meal is characterized by mellowness. The space itself is a pleasant anachronism, a ballroom of soaring ceilings and Juliet balconies. It could be the uptown digs of a deposed dictator, except for the Victoria’s Secret models captured mid-writhe on the billboard outside, and the wall of cheerful Robert Risko portraits, which, on closer inspection, depict “Macy’s personalities”: Michael Kors, Ryan Seacrest, Martha Stewart. Just past the gelato counter, her towels are marked down. ♦

Open weekdays for lunch and dinner and weekends for brunch and dinner. Entrées $20-$28.

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