A Critic’s Last Look at the Four Seasons and Brasserie

The Four Seasons was New York’s hottest restaurant in the summer of 1959, with an opening cost of $4.5 million. It was one of the first to change its entire menu with the seasons—a theme restaurant devised by relentless hitmaker Joe Baum—and this menu wasn’t classic French but extravagant, modern New American. Before the end of the year, Craig Claiborne called it “the most exciting restaurant to open in New York within the last two decades.”

It’s not so exciting any more, but every now and then I meet someone’s grandma who goes there once a fortnight after a blowout, a couple that goes back each year for an anniversary, or a power lunch enthusiast with love for the Grill Room. I went to the Four Seasons last week for the very first time, knowing that real estate investor Aby Rosen wouldn’t be renewing the lease next year and that in a few months, one of the city’s most famous restaurants would have to pack it in.