![]() The inner sanctum: a private dining room in the Four Seasons. (“I’ve hatched every one of my deals in the booths over that swordfish and salad,” whirrs Tina Brown.) In 1977 two new managers, Julian Niccolini of Italy and Alex von Bidder of Switzerland, arrived at the restaurant – they’re now co-owners – and under their eyes the Four Seasons became the de facto canteen of New York’s elite, with a regular roster of bankers, fashion types, and at least one war criminal. New York’s world of publishing gravitated to the Grill Room, as did magazine editors with expense accounts larger than the entire budgets of today’s viral content abattoirs. Inside, tycoons and socialites conducted a choreographed spectacle of dining and table-hopping worthy of France’s ancien régime. Outside, the city came within days of bankruptcy, and the streets were choked with crime. The New York Times’ critic acclaimed its decor and its verve, though he huffed that the kitchen was not as “exquisite” as “ la grande cuisine française”.īut the restaurant’s heyday was the 1970s. (Even its name was a statement of intent, decades before the brunching hordes got fixated on “seasonality”.) Upon its opening it was the most expensive restaurant in the city. In its early days, the Four Seasons staked its claim as a home for American cuisine cooked with the same ambition, and priced at the same altitudes, then still reserved for French restaurants. Photograph: 1998 by Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko/Photographic copyright Tate, London 2006/BBC Diners sat in nimble, cantilevered chairs of Mies’s design Eero Saarinen kitted out the women’s powder room with his well-known tulip chairs and Ada Louise Huxtable, not yet the doyenne of New York architecture critics, had a hand in everything from the champagne flutes to the bread baskets.īlack on Maroon by Mark Rothko. ![]() The architect Philip Johnson was tasked with designing the space, which he paneled in rich burled walnut delicate window coverings made of aluminum beads made the light appear to dance. The Four Seasons opened in 1959 at the base of the Seagram Building, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s city-reshaping black skyscraper on Park Avenue – a building that the late critic Herbert Muschamp, with slight but understandable hyperbole, once called the greatest work of architecture of the past thousand years. But for architectural preservationists, students of modern design, and lovers of New York, this is a winter of discontent. The tables, the furnishings, and even the pots and pans will be flogged off at auction later this month. Then the restaurant – the place Jackie Kennedy called “the cathedral”, an acme of modernist design outshining any other space in New York – will be despoiled. ![]() But after six decades, the Four Seasons, as stately as ever in its glass box off Park Avenue, will complete its last service on Saturday. T here are elegant restaurants and erotic restaurants, restaurants for business and restaurants for pleasure – and one that was all of these things, more beautiful than any other. ![]()
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