The Four Seasons: NY ‘power lunch’ mecca turns 50, with guests from Dalai Lama to Madonna

The Four Seasons: NY ‘power lunch’ mecca turns 50

NEW YORK — The Dalai Lama. Madonna. Bill Clinton. Mary J. Blige. And a 13-year-old celebrating his bar mitzvah, complete with scantily clad dancers his father hired to usher the teen into manhood.

They all were guests at The Four Seasons restaurant, the storied dining room that practically invented New York’s concept of the “power lunch” — a networking mecca of money, clout, good looks, even global spirituality.

This year marks the 50th anniversary for the restaurant just off Park Avenue on Manhattan’s East Side, a two-story culinary cathedral awash in creamy Italian marble and French walnut designed by architect Philip Johnson. Chairs and bar stools are by another architectural genius, Mies van der Rohe, who designed the Seagram skyscraper above the restaurant.

It’s hardly cozy. But that’s not the point.

The Four Seasons is an international publicity machine and, despite its age, still a place to be seen. Competitors have cropped up — hot venues like Jean Georges, Per Se and Momofuku Ko — but none are landmarks, a status The Four Seasons earned in 1989.

At the helm is Julian Niccolini, the Tuscan-born managing partner. Part joker, part provocateur, part power-broker, he presides over the dining room and knows the details of guests’ lives, secrets and all.

Niccolini loves to rib guests — he once sent a top investment banker a sack of raw potato spuds, with a ridiculously long recipe for baking potatoes, to make up for what the guest said were overpriced potatoes.

The power-lunch regulars returned the ribbing at a 50th anniversary Friar’s Club-type “roast” of The Four Seasons on Tuesday — a $300-a-plate benefit for Citymeals-on-Wheels.

“You can see so many wonderful works of modern art,” Martha Stewart deadpanned about the restaurant, which over the years has displayed art by Picasso, Miro and Jackson Pollock, “And that’s just the plastic surgery.”

Gossip columnist Liz Smith added, “Have you ever examined the bill at the end of a meal? At the very least, these guys are extortionists.”

An appetizer of lobster, crabmeat and clams sells for $42 and a prime aged skillet steak and filet of bison with foie gras for $55 each. At $10, a spectacular mound of cotton candy was once a bargain — and it’s now free.

In the crowd was Edgar M. Bronfman Sr., whose Seagram whiskey fortune financed the world’s most expensive skyscraper when it went up in 1958, followed by The Four Seasons in 1959.

The Four Seasons’ aura of importance peaked during the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s. But this grande dame of restaurants clings to her position, despite the cool, corporate elegance some now consider passe.

“No Longer Young, but Still Turning Heads,” read a New York Times headline by restaurant critic Frank Bruni.

Guests mount the stairs from an unobtrusive entrance on East 52nd Street, off Park Avenue’s sea of yellow cabs and limousines. “We once had a guest called Pablo, who left behind this gift,” says Niccolini, glancing at the Picasso tapestry on the wall at the top of the grand staircase — painted for a 1919 French ballet production.

In 1962, John F. Kennedy arrived here for his 45th birthday dinner, before heading to Madison Square Garden to hear Marilyn Monroe sing a breathy “Happy Birthday, Mr. President.”

The menu then and now includes hoity-toity fare like lobster, crabmeat, caviar, clams and oysters, as well produce to match the changing seasons. But America thrives on hamburger and french fries — also on the menu for a whopping $39.

In this tough economic year, the restaurant lost as much as 20 percent of its business and the staff is down to 137 people, from 157. Tending to the finances is Niccolini’s Swiss co-managing partner, Alex von Bidder, who quietly tallies revenues — $17 million last year — and is rarely seen among guests. That’s Niccolini’s job.

When someone asks his wife what he does, “She has three words — ‘Party, party, party!’”

“It’s not true,” he adds. “At the end of the day, you make sure you go home again, back to reality. But this is reality for a lot of people.”

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On the Net:

The Four Seasons: www.fourseasonsrestaurant.com/index2.htm