Category: NY TIMES

New York kept certain fantasies about the Four Seasons alive for a long time. We told ourselves that it was an elegant restaurant, that it was an important restaurant, that the roll call of designers, editors and so on who ate lunch there — a short list that grew shorter as publishers moved downtown, expense […]

A bastion of ritualized, old-guard dining in New York City is about to be taken over by three brash young men who were born decades after it opened.

The space that houses the Four Seasons, a restaurant on East 52nd Street that has symbolized Manhattan power and elegance for more than half a century, is set next year to become a stage for the creative cooking and stylized showmanship of the men behind scene-making downtown restaurants like Carbone, Santina and Dirty French.

In a test kitchen in NoLIta, the windows obscured with paper, a group of men sat at a cluttered table, carving steaks and wrangling over the future of one of New York’s most famous dining spaces.

“I like the ’60s vibe of the green olive cross-section,” one man said, chewing a bit of goose and duck terrine filled with foie gras. “But is it too much pork fat?” another asked.

At least once a week for over a year, the partners in Major Food Group have met to tinker with the food they will serve at their next project, the Landmark Rooms at the Seagram Building — formerly known as the Four Seasons.

Since Major Food Group took over the former Four Seasons space in Midtown, there has been much hand-wringing over what will become of THE GRILL Room and Pool Room, which have landmark status, but very little over the fate of the square bar that greeted patrons as they climbed the stairs to the restaurant.

Preservationists and students of New York drinking culture will be relieved to know that the rosewood bar — designed, like the rest of the restaurant, by Philip Johnson — will probably be the least altered part of the space.

Forget the famous power lunch. For the time being, forget about any lunch at all in the rooms that used to house the Four Seasons.

When THE GRILL, the first of two new restaurants in the Seagram Building space, opens to the public on May 2, it will serve only dinner. Jeff Zalaznick, a partner in Major Food Group, which now runs the restaurant complex, said the group wants the restaurant to make its mark as a destination for dinner. (Lunch will be added in about two months.)