The nice man who brought samples of the banoffee macaron to me and other customers one recent morning began, a few moments later, to gently buff the doors and windows of a new, rose-gold prototype car with a soft cloth. I could see this because the car and I were sharing a room on West 14th Street. The car was in the back and I was in the middle, sitting at one of the cafe tables near the stairs to the second floor, where there is a bar shaped like a wheel and a restaurant with a menu devised by Gregory Marchand, the chef of the Frenchie restaurants in Paris and London.

The employees in all of these rooms work for the Union Square Hospitality Group, which I suppose means that Danny Meyer, the group’s founder and one of the world’s best-known restaurateurs, is now also in the business of polishing automobiles. The whole operation is called Intersect by Lexus, which gives you a good idea who made the car and was paying to keep it shiny and free of dust.

Intersect by Lexus is one of those modern places where brands, instead of asking you to buy one of their products then and there, instead try to make you feel the kinds of emotions about the brand that may lead to a sale later on.

This is a job formerly performed by advertisements. In fact, Lexus used to publish a print magazine and mail it to its customers, back when that seemed like a good way to persuade people to have emotions about a car. Now we live in the age of the “branded experience.” A toilet-paper manufacturer will send you a wheeled toilet on demand. A mattress company will encourage you to sleep inside a roaming “napmobile.” Makers of a crunchy orange snack open restaurants, lasting just a few days, where chefs put the crunchy orange snack into meatballs, tacos, cheesecakes and everything else.