The Four Seasons Restaurant (known colloquially as the Four Seasons) was a New American cuisine restaurant in the Midtown Manhattan neighborhood of New York City from 1959 to 2019. The Four Seasons operated within the Seagram Building at 99 East 52nd Street for most of its existence, although it relocated to 42 East 49th Street in its final year of operation. The restaurant was themed around the seasons of the year, with menus, decorations, and vegetation that changed every three months. It attracted numerous high-profile personalities and often hosted "power lunches". Despite mixed commentary of the restaurant's food, the Four Seasons was highly popular, winning the James Beard Award many times.
The Four Seasons was created in order to fill a vacant space next to the Seagram Building's lobby. Originally operated by Restaurant Associates, the Four Seasons opened on July 20, 1959, and soon became a popular luxury restaurant. Following a downturn in patronage in 1973, Tom Margittai and Paul Kovi acquired the Four Seasons, which became known for its power lunches. In 1994, Margittai and Kovi passed operation of the restaurant to their junior partners, Alex von Bidder and Julian Niccolini, who operated the restaurant until the Seagram Building location closed in July 2016. After a two-year hiatus, von Bidder and Niccolini reopened the restaurant on 49th Street in August 2018, but the Four Seasons was unprofitable in its new location and closed permanently on June 11, 2019.
The interior of the original restaurant was primarily designed by Philip Johnson, who worked with several designers, including L. Garth and Ada Louise Huxtable. The interior consisted of two discrete spaces known as the Grill Room and the Pool Room, connected by a corridor, as well as a basement lobby on 52nd Street. The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission designated these spaces as an interior landmark in 1989. The spaces had plantings and custom tableware and furniture.
Art inside the restaurant included a permanent mural by James Rosenquist; a major Richard Lippold sculpture; a curtain designed by Pablo Picasso; and temporary exhibitions that included works by Joan Miró, Frank Stella, Ronnie Landfield, and others. The restaurant attracted celebrities, businessmen, and politicians including Anna Wintour, Henry Kissinger, Martha Stewart, Bill Clinton, George Lois, Bill Bernbach, Jackie Kennedy, and Princess Diana.
History The Seagram Building in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, had been completed in 1958 to designs by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Philip Johnson, and Kahn & Jacobs. During the building's planning, the space behind the ground-story lobby had been intended as a major public area. A crafts museum, an automotive showroom, and an upscale restaurant, were variously proposed for that space. Philip Johnson described it as "leftover space", saying that "we could as well have put a Chrysler showroom there". The building's leasing agent Cushman & Wakefield selected Joseph Baum of Restaurant Associates in 1957 to operate the Four Seasons Restaurant in the space. Samuel Bronfman, the chairman of the building's developer Seagram, agreed to the restaurant plan after he learned that it would increase his building's value.
The restaurant's managers had free rein to create a restaurant, which ultimately cost $4.5 million (). At the time, it was the most expensive restaurant ever built in New York City. Philip Johnson was hired to design the Four Seasons, as Mies was uninterested in designing the restaurant space inside the Seagram Building. William Pahlmann was also hired for general design; Richard Kelly for lighting design; Karl Linn for landscaping; Everett Lawson Conklin for horticultural detail; Marie Nichols for weavings; and Richard Lippold for the Grill Room's brass sculptures. Interiors magazine said that Restaurant Associates was "evidently convinced that in interiors, as well as food, you get what you pay for".
Opening and early years The restaurant opened on July 20, 1959. Time magazine described the Four Seasons as employing "25 chefs and bakers and a battalion of 125 cummerbunded captains, waiters, wine stewards, barmen and busboys". Conversely, The New York Times wrote that there were 15 busboys, 20 captains, and 50 waiters. The Four Seasons' staff had their own seamstress and a chef who cooked exclusively for them. The executive chef was Albert Stockli, who created several menu items specifically for the restaurant and worked with Restaurant Associates until 1965. Dishes on the Four Seasons' menu were sourced from around the world. At the time of the restaurant's opening, The New York Times reported that lunch typically cost $6, while dinner cost $10 to $12, excluding alcoholic beverages. The opening of the Four Seasons prompted other New York restaurant owners to boycott Seagram liquor, as the company had helped finance a competitor within its own building.
Soon after its opening, the Four Seasons became a popular event venue. For example, it hosted a birthday party for then-U.S. president John F. Kennedy in May 1962, as well as a dinner for the Confrérie des Chevaliers du Tastevin wine-tasting organization in December 1962. Kennedy's birthday party was the first time that the restaurant was completely closed to the public, but a similar closure also occurred in 1965, when Sharman Douglas hosted a party there for Princess Margaret. The stature of the restaurant was such that, according to Peter Hellman of New York magazine, Stockli "could barely be bothered to greet" a visiting royal family who walked through the door. The Four Seasons was also a popular drinking spot in the mid-1960s.
By the early 1970s, the restaurant was past its prime. This was in part due to the New York City fiscal crisis, as well as the fact that younger audiences were not necessarily interested in the Four Seasons' unconventional menu items. The Wall Street Journal said that "power lunchers looked the place over, saw tourists, and were horrified". Though the restaurant still attracted a loyal following on weekends, it was no longer popular on weekdays. Philip Johnson recalled that, on one day in early 1973, he and his partner John Burgee were the only people eating lunch at the Four Seasons. Restaurant Associates initially decided to continue operating the Four Seasons, which was one of the company's flagship restaurants, even as it closed other restaurants to save money. The firm ultimately decided to give up its lease of the Four Seasons by 1973, though it took over a year for Restaurant Associates to relinquish its lease.
Margittai and Kovi operation Restaurant Associates vice president Tom Margittai and Four Seasons director Paul Kovi acquired the Four Seasons in 1973. Shortly afterward, Margittai and Kovi hired Joseph "Seppi" Renggli as the executive chef; under Renggli's leadership, the Four Seasons added new menus for each season. The new operators hired George Lois to design a full-page advertisement, which was published in The New York Times on May 15, 1974. Margittai and Kovi concentrated their efforts on attracting guests; for example, after Margittai called back a customer who wrote a two-page letter complaining about the quality of the service, that customer became a regular. The men also had their staff "study religiously their customers' desires" by remembering their orders. One of the two rooms, which had been a bar, was converted to the Grill Room, which served simpler meals than the more upscale Pool Room. By 1975, Joseph Baum said that Margittai and Kovi had "done a superb job" in restoring the Four Seasons to its former elegance.
In the 1970s and 1980s, many of the Four Seasons' most important guests worked in the publishing and journalism industries, and the restaurant became widely known for its power lunches. The book publisher Michael Korda said in 1977 that the Grill Room was "the most powerful place to eat lunch in town". Two years later, an Esquire article declared the Grill Room to be the setting for "America's Most Powerful Lunch". According to CNN, the term "power lunch" may have come from the Esquire article. Upon its 20th anniversary, the restaurant largely retained its original appearance, although the trees and some of the tableware had been replaced. A mural by James Rosenquist was installed in the Pool Room for the restaurant's 25th anniversary in 1984. The Four Seasons' operators further redecorated the restaurant in 1988 at a cost of $500,000.
When the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) was considering designating the Seagram Building as a city landmark in 1989, Margittai and Kovi separately endorsed landmark designation for the restaurant. The Seagram Company, as well as the building's then-owner Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association of America (TIAA), opposed designating the restaurant as a landmark, even as they endorsed similar protections for the Seagram Building and its lobby. On October 3, 1989, the Four Seasons became New York City's second landmarked restaurant, after Gage and Tollner in Brooklyn.
In January 1990, the New York City Board of Estimate ratified the designation. The TIAA sued the LPC in 1990 to overturn the landmark designation for the Four Season, arguing that the restaurant was personal property and that the designation would force the restaurant to continue operating even if the owners wished to close it. The Four Seasons' operators had supported landmark designation precisely for that reason, as it would give the operators more leverage when they renegotiated their lease. The lawsuit was escalated to the New York Court of Appeals, which upheld the designation in 1993.
Meanwhile, following the Black Monday stock market crash in 1987, patronage at the Four Seasons had started to decline. In the year following the crash, business decreased by as much as 15 percent, and Margittai and Kovi had to fire some of the staff. In part because of the declining business, Renggli resigned as the restaurant's executive chef in 1990. Christian Albin was hired to replace him. Even in early 1992, the Grill Room still had only six to ten patrons on a typical night. Patronage recovered by the end of 1992, when the Grill Room was filled to capacity at night.
Von Bidder and Niccolini operation
1990s and 2000s In 1994, Margittai and Kovi passed operation of the restaurant to their junior partners, Alex von Bidder and Julian Niccolini, who continued to run the restaurant in the Seagram Building for two decades. At the time, von Bidder had expressed optimism that the restaurant would again become a popular venue for business lunches. During this decade, financial executives came to frequent the Four Seasons. Seagram & Sons bought a majority stake in the restaurant from Margittai and Kovi in 1995, and they renewed the restaurant's lease for 17 years in 1998. Power lunches at the Four Seasons again declined following the September 11 attacks in 2001, though they had started to return within two years.
French media conglomerate Vivendi, which acquired the Seagram Company in 2000, started selling off the Seagram Building's art in 2003 to raise money. These included some of the artwork in the Four Seasons, which were generally not protected as a city landmark, with the exception of Richard Lippold's sculptures. Christian Albin, the Four Seasons' executive chef, died suddenly in June 2009. Fabio Trabocchi was hired as the Four Seasons' executive chef in October 2009, but he left that position after only three months.