At Cathédrale, you look up. That is the first move the restaurant wants from you, and the enormous dining room at the Moxy East Village is designed to get it.

The Rockwell Group space treats dinner as an architectural event. The scale is unusually large for downtown Manhattan, and a table can feel small beneath it. Tao Group describes the cooking as French-Mediterranean, with southern France joined by influences from Italy, Spain and Greece. Before any of that registers, however, there is the room.

There is nothing inherently unserious about wanting spectacle with dinner. New York restaurant culture sometimes treats the modest dining room as a guarantee of authenticity, as though exposed brick and difficult chairs confer virtue. Cathédrale is built for the opposite impulse. Birthdays, dates and celebrations benefit from scenery.

The food therefore has an unusual assignment. It is not the only attraction, and the restaurant does not pretend otherwise. The menu’s Mediterranean breadth suits a dining room in which the bottle, the company and the surroundings are all competing for attention.

That makes Cathédrale easier to understand as an occasion restaurant than as a temple to a particular cuisine. The experience is deliberately produced. For some dinners, that is precisely what you want. Cathédrale knows the ceiling is part of what it is selling.