At Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s latest restaurant, Public Kitchen, the menu is supposed to have a theme: the food of New York City. Nobody I brought there noticed it, though. Somehow it slipped my mind, too, even though I’d read about it weeks before my first meal, and had eaten things like smoked salmon and Manhattan clam chowder.

The restaurant is all the way in the back of the ground floor of the new hotel on the Lower East Side designed by Herzog & de Meuron. The owner, Ian Schrager, calls it simply Public, and to make sure it lives up to its name he has divided the common areas into a sequence of hangouts.

To get inside you walk down a hedgerow of rhododendrons flanked by two small lawns where hotel guests alight on Adirondack chairs as if they were up in the mountains and not a knish’s throw away from Chrystie Street. The scene changes once you come through the revolving front doors to face a pair of escalators reflected off into infinity by polished metal mirrors. It may remind you of the entrance to a mall, and the tacit message is similar: Keep circulating until you see something you want.

Around the escalators to the right you come to a Vongerichten-run grab-and-go market and beyond that, the first of two Vongerichten-catered bars. While the other offers snacky highlights from the Public Kitchen menu, this one serves the whole megillah. At the far end of the bar you reach the entrance to the restaurant. Strangely, it’s one of Public’s least interesting rooms, a yawning, noisy canteen whose walls are tiled with the same shiny marble that more expensive hotels put in their showers.