When it opened in 1959 on Park Avenue in the Seagram Building, The Four Seasons eating place became a monetary flop. Today, sixty years later, its $30 million reincarnation in a nearby Park Avenue construction will close its doors after less than a year in business. In doing so, it’s dealing with an associate, Alex von Bidder, who wrote in an e-mail, “We had been privileged to work with one of the greatest culinary teams and high-quality team of workers that have stayed with us through a few difficult times over the route of our records.” The last was, brutally, a question of numbers: The new restaurant was not bringing in sufficient clients to show a profit, and investors noticed little hope that it ever could.
Ironically, the original Four Seasons, beneath the benefaction of the Bronfman family that owned the Ludwig Mies van der Rohe-designed Seagram Building, didn’t start to make money till the mid-Nineteen Seventies and had largely appeared no longer as a totemic New York restaurant but as one frequented using out-or-towners who came to wonder on the magnificence of its 3-level layout, its Picasso tapestry, a large, babbling pool inside the center of 1 dining room and the converting of foliage and colors—right down to the servers’ cummerbunds and the printed kind on the menus—each season.
Even after The Four Seasons advanced into the fundamental New York eating place after a 1979 article in Esquire declared its Grill Room the placing for “America’s Most Powerful Lunch,” its fortunes have been constantly tied to the booms and busts of the economy, enduring the deep recessions of 1987 and 2008 and reveling inside the euphoric highs of the dot.Com technology and Internet Age. By any degree, 60 years is a top-notch time for any eating place to live to tell the tale of each adjustment within the economy, tastes, and style.
Indeed, it became The Four Seasons’ specific style, created through Philip Johnson and the architects of the handling organization Restaurant Associates, that exhibited a dramatic glamour in its hovering ceilings, glistening Richard Lippold striking sculpture over the bar, rippling metallic beaded curtains, museum-nice fixtures, and desk settings designed by way of Garth and Louise Huxtable. (In 1989, the eating place changed into a specified neighborhood landmark using the city.)
Some viewed it as a sort of company cathedral, others as a fable of an arrogant New York mindset, in a day when Restaurant Associates pioneered the cutting-edge “theme eating place,” with its very own Hawaiian Room and the Forum of the Twelve Caesars.
The assets and assistance of the Bronfman family’s fortune appeared endless, no longer least. Simultaneously, Sam Bronfman’s daughter Phyllis Lambert organized for the Picasso tapestry to be hung in a hallway connecting the Grill and Pool rooms. Exuberant Restaurant Associates managers loved carte blanche to create what became the most costly eating place ever built in New York—$4.Five million (approximately $40 million in 2019)—and the menu, with James Beard’s input, pioneered what later became known as “New American Cuisine.” The eating place became some of the first to sell the new California wines and registered a hallmark for “Spa Cuisine.” Oddly enough, before establishing, when Sam Bronfman was asked what he’d want to see on the menu, he spoke back, “All I need is to be able to get a good piece of flanken, okay?”
By the 1980s, The Four Seasons had taken at the twin air of mystery of being the epicenter where the most powerful humans in finance, media, the arts, and politics staked out their territory daily in The Grill Room. Simultaneously, within the Pool Room, a miles more flamboyant environment entreated more varied consumers to indulge in Page Six-worthy occasions, such as several activities. At the same time, girls jumped into the pool, and fashion designers held shows there.
In 1996, the restaurant’s veteran managers, Alex von Bidder, a staid Swiss skilled at the Hotel School of Cornell University, and Julian Niccolini, a churlish Tuscan trained in Rome, took over as managing companions, preserving The Four Seasons’ eminence nicely into the 21stcentury. In 2000, actual estate developer Aby Rosen offered the Seagram Building and stated he might update The Four Seasons with a brand new eating place, forcing out von Bidder and Niccolini.
Because of the interior’s landmark status, Rosen should do little to regulate whatever is in the authentic layout. He changed the names of the two eating areas to The Grill and The Pool. Upon commencing, the restaurant acquired respectful critiques, attracting many old regulars and various interest-seekers.
But due to the fact von Bidder and Niccolini retained rights to the name The Four Seasons (which was usually something of trouble while guests showed up wondering they were checking into the Four Seasons Hotel), they have been capable of enticing investors to recreate, if now not mirror, what has been a unique group. The assumption was that the antique-time regulars would return, bringing alongside a brand new generation of financial enterprise-strength brokers, even supposing many of the former had outgrown the trimmings of what The Four Seasons as soon as represented or undeniably exceeded away.
