Good restaurants don’t rain down from nowhere, but Crown Shy came close. No doubt it went through the same birth pangs as all the others. As far as I can tell, though, it simply materialized one morning this March at 70 Pine Street, and was open for business that afternoon by the time the financial district’s elevators began disgorging traders, bankers and analysts in search of 5-o’clock refreshment.

One reason it seems to have crept up on the city is that it’s a large, well-capitalized, big-time restaurant of the kind that only established groups seem able to get off the ground these days. Yet Crown Shy doesn’t come from Danny Meyer, Andrew Carmellini or any of the other usual suspects. Its two main players were recruited after talks among April Bloomfield, Ken Friedman and the building’s developer fell apart in 2016, before accusations of sexual harassment engulfed Mr. Friedman.

Crown Shy’s chef, James Kent, used to run the kitchen at the NoMad, and his partner, Jeff Katz, is the managing partner at Del Posto. Neither exactly fell off the turnip truck last week. As a team, though, they’re unproven, and as they went through construction and hiring, the drumbeat of publicity was more muted than it might have been if marquee names had led the project.

Then there is Crown Shy’s location, a sprawling, soaring, street-level space that, as far as anyone recalls, has never held a restaurant before. Many New Yorkers have seen the 1932 building’s distinctive, hulking, pyramidal silhouette on the skyline, but until recently, when the offices on its 67 stories were repurposed as expensive apartments and hotel rooms, not many had encountered the frenzied exuberance of the lobby, which makes use of polished marble in at least five contrasting colors. It looks like something Bernini would have designed if he’d lived to see the Jazz Age. Depending on which entrance you use — the revolving doors are crowned with aluminum reliefs of Art Deco flowers being pollinated by elongated stylized butterflies — you may want to allow an extra five or 10 minutes to take it all in before you eat.