The Return of the Power Restaurant

Some new restaurants you can encounter and assess with dispassionate objectivity. Some you’ve been waiting to go to your whole life.

I’m being literal. In the early 1980s, for their wedding anniversary, my parents went to The Four Seasons for dinner. This was a big deal in our house. They had been once before, soon after getting married in 1965. My mother’s salary then, as a newly minted New York City public-school teacher assigned to an elementary school in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, was $5,300 before taxes; my father, variously a cabdriver, optician, civil servant, and eventually CPA, could not have earned much more. Luckily, the pre-theater prix fixe menu was $16.95, a number that nevertheless required, if not scrimping, then at least a deep breath at a time when the fried-shrimp dinner at Lundy Bros., closer to home in Sheepshead Bay, cost a mere three bucks.