A History of the Four Seasons Restaurant

October 2016

The Four Seasons closed its original location on July 16th, 2016. I popped by this self-proclaimed premier restaurant this summer, in the hopes of catching a fleeting glimpse of the museum-like institution I'd dreamed of visiting. Indeed, it would soon be lost to history, as it was closing in ten days. I took note of the iconic Pool Room, (in)discreetly scanning for noteworthy characters. An eccentrically placed rubber duck bobbing up and down in the room’s marble pool stood in comical contrast to the restaurant’s airy sophistication. Upon exiting, I took the unremarkable hardcover book offered to visitors in the restaurant’s final gesture of self-promotion and went on my way.

The arrival of this book into my possession coincided with the removal of my wisdom teeth several days later, a procedure which left me very incapacitated and very bored. I filled this time primarily with aggravated groans, involuntary, unsightly facial expressions, obsessive ice chip ingestion, five beginner Spanish murder mysteries, and, well­ – this book. It resembles what would by any common definition be characterized as a coffee table book, and I assumed it would come to inhabit this role on my own table upon my return home. However, due to an inability to access the Internet, I found myself obligated to resort to more primitive forms of entertainment, such as reading and staring dejectedly into space. Thus, when not otherwise occupied by self-pitying thoughts about the state of my face, I found myself learning more than I ever planned to know about one New York restaurant and the building it inhabited.

I was on most accounts correct in my initial assumptions about the book. It generously fed my cover-judging ego, confirming my expectations with an introduction that included six straight pages of name-dropping. Yet in my infinite wisdom, undiminished by the recent removal of four symbolic teeth, I trudged along until I hit what turned out to be juicy architectural gossip.

The Noblest Caesar Salad, or, the restaurant business in the early twentieth century

The first real restaurant in the United States was Delmonico’s. It opened in 1831 in Lower Manhattan, and became an extravagant destination restaurant for all visiting dignitaries – Napoleon III was presented with a seven-page menu that included nine soups, twenty varieties of veal, eighteen vegetables and sixty-two wines. Fine dining became an increasingly elitist pastime in the latter half of the 19th century, though until the second half of the twentieth, ‘fine’ was defined more by flash and eccentricity than any modern notion of quality. Restaurants often threw together favorites from around the world in menus they dubbed “continental,” combining things like Italian spaghetti, American ham, Russian-style eggs, Creole gumbo, and strawberry shortcake. Dishes were frequently flamed tableside or brought out with sparklers in darkness for an additional crowd-pleasing factor. The Prohibition, however, spelled the end of many of these ‘deluxe’ New York restaurants, as their customers abandoned them for speakeasies serving bathtub gin.

Extravagant theme restaurants became a big hit after the Second World War. Perhaps the most over-the-top example was the Forum of the Twelve Ceasars, for which it’s designers travelled to Rome and Naples in search of artifacts, curiosities, and ancient recipes with which to thrill customers. They recreated the Appian Way in the foyer, designed ice buckets to resemble centurion’s helmets, dressed waiters in togas, and had Milanese brass service plates imprinted with Bacchus, god of wine. Busboys were requested to read the works of Suetonius and Apicius, who chronicled imperial feasting in ancient Rome. Poet Robert Graves lectured the staff on Greek and Roman culture, and a classics professor oversaw the translation of the restaurant’s menu into Latin. The cherry on the cake was Forum’s hilarious naming of dishes – customers were served “The Noblest Caesar Salad of Them All,” “Chicken Varius in a Shell of Centurion Almonds,” and “Sirloin in Red Wine, Marrow, and Onions – a Gallic recipe Julius collected while there on business.”

The Seagram Building

The Four Seasons restaurant was located in a Manhattan skyscraper named the Seagram building. In 1954, Samuel Bronfman, who made his fortune selling alcohol during the Prohibition, began to make plans for corporate headquarters for his Seagram Corporation on the corner of 52nd and Park Avenue. Not wanting anything unorthodox to disturb his conservative Park Avenue neighbors, he opted for an unremarkable architectural design – until his daughter Phyllis intervened. She condemned what she thought would be a “very mediocre building,” insisting on the importance of delving into a new architectural style called the International Style that had begun to take shape in the twenties. At the time, she was living a Bohemian life in Paris as an escape from her family’s enormous wealth that both protected and suffocated her. Her father saw in the Seagram building a means of luring his daughter back to America, and agreed to let her orchestrate the project.

After endless campaigning, Phyllis got her father to approve of German architect Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe. Mies had designed an all-glass skyscraper in 1921 and had been director of the Bauhaus school of design in Dessau from 1930 until it’s closing by the Nazis, upon which he immigrated to the United States. His designs refined the industrial aesthetic of the Bauhaus school, focusing on clean lines and quality materials. Interestingly, though he learned the craft as an apprentice to local architects in Berlin, he never actually studied it; only through fellow architect Philip Johnson’s efforts was he specially exempted from New York’s licensing requirements and allowed to design the Seagram building.

The Seagram was the first building of its kind in the city to be set back one hundred feet from the street, in front of a large open plaza. Before it, most new buildings started just a few feet from the curb and zigzagged upwards – previous zoning laws required the top tower to be only 25 percent the size of the actual property. Mies filled the Seagram’s plaza with pools and gingko trees to create a peaceful environment from which the building could be admired. He considered it his “crowning glory,” the exemplification of the “less is more” motto that defined the International Style.

The Four Seasons

The makers of The Four Seasons – architect Philip Johnson and overseer Phyllis Lambert, Restaurant Associates executives Joseph Baum and Jerome Brody, chef Albert Stöckli, and many talented others – envisioned “a restaurant that would express everything New York had come to represent: power, money, modernism, sophistication, eccentricity, and iconoclasm.” They imagined an institution that offered indisputably the best in every respect, from fare to design to service. Excellence was pursued with clinical detail. No expense was spared; costly New York square footage was happily wasted on superfluous enhancements to the space. The most salient example of this is in the area that was to become the iconic Pool Room: in the restaurant’s early stages, it was considered much too large. Only after the extravagantly wasteful addition of a softly gurgling, twenty-foot-square, white Carrara marble pool was the space deemed sufficiently inviting. It remains the most expensive restaurant in the city’s history, having cost $4.5 million to open.

At the centerpiece of Baum and Brody’s vision was artistic and architectural collaboration with some of the most important artists of the time. Three Mirós hung in the downstairs lobby, and an exchange program with the Museum of Modern Art was set up in which sculptures and artwork were lent to the restaurant and swapped throughout the year, in keeping with the restaurant’s theme of changing seasons. An attempt at collaboration with abstract expressionist Mark Rothko was, well, less successful. Realizing that his commissioned work would be exhibited in an “exclusive restaurant” for the “richest bastards in New York,” Rothko approached it with the “strictly malicious intention” of “[painting] something that [would] ruin the appetite of every son of bitch who ever [ate] in that room.” Unsurprisingly, his paintings, which were intended to “make the viewers feel that they [were] trapped in a room where all the doors and windows [were] bricked up,” were rejected. Finding themselves in a bit of a pickle – a fifty-six foot long wall in the upper dining room stood bare – Brody desperately implored an art collecting friend of his for something to cover the walls. He was lent what was, at the time, a relatively worthless painting called Blue Poles that the collector was afraid his children would destroy if he didn’t do anything with it. It was a Jackson Pollock.

The most iconic artwork at The Four Seasons was a curtain by Pablo Picasso, designed in 1920 for Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes’ production of Le Tricorne. Baum initially objected to what he deemed an unwelcome intrusion in the dining room, complaining that the depicted bullfight would turn off filet mignon-eating customers. Ultimately, he compromised, and the curtain was hung in the corridor connecting the restaurant’s two main rooms.

References and quotes taken from The Four Seasons: A History of America’s Premier Restaurant (John F. Mariani and Alex Von Bidder, 1999).