Four Seasons, Lunch Spot for Manhattan’s Prime Movers, Moves On

JEK

Senior Insider
Four Seasons, Lunch Spot for Manhattan’s Prime Movers, Moves On

By WILLIAM GRIMESJULY 8, 2016

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The Four Seasons in 1960, one year after it opened. In its time, it was the most modern, the most daring, the most New York restaurant the city had ever seen. CreditLeonard Stern

In New York, a restaurant that lasts 10 years is old. Most fail to make it to their first birthday. When the Seagram Building turns the lights out on the Four Seasons restaurant next week, it will end a run that began in 1959. Eisenhower was president, the Edsel was still new and television viewers tuned in, for the first time, to “Bonanza” and “The Twilight Zone.” It was a very long time ago.
The Four Seasons will serve its last meal on July 16. On July 26, Julian Niccolini and Alex von Bidder, the partners who took over the restaurant 21 years ago, will auction off its contents, from the Grill Room banquettes down to the last fork and spoon. They have promised to open a new Four Seasons within a five-minute walk of the present location, on East 52nd Street at Park Avenue. But the Four Seasons of old will vanish.

Its closing will mark the end of an era. The Four Seasons, probably the most important New York restaurant of the 20th century, Americanized fine dining and set in motion many of the trends that still dominate restaurant culture in the United States.

In its time, the Four Seasons was the most modern, the most daring, the most New York restaurant the city had ever seen. Defined visually by the confident modernism of Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building, it expressed, through its menu, décor and clientele, a vision of Manhattan as the nerve center of the postwar era: a nexus of talent, money and ambition.


Full article -- the first farm-to-table restaurant?

Four Seasons, Lunch Spot for Manhattan’s Prime Movers, Moves On
 
L'Ingénieux Hidalgo keeping guard over some old Four Seasons treasures. Only lunched there on one occasion but could have fancied it as my daily cantine. :blush-smile:

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