A restaurant called “the Four Seasons” will open a few blocks south of its original Seagram Building home later in 2017. But this season belongs to The Grill — the first of two distinct new eateries to bow in the landmarked dining rooms inside the also-landmarked Seagram tower at 375 Park Ave.
While Four Seasons devotees like Henry Kissinger and Barbara Walters are more than welcome at the new venues under new ownership, the team at The Grill clearly has a fresh clientele in mind — younger customers for whom better food than the Four Seasons usually had matters more than ancient anecdotes involving long-dead celebrities.
Led by famed chef Mario Carbone, The Grill, which opens next week, is betting the ranch, farm and stream on a style of service that went out of fashion eons ago — tableside carving, saucing and flambéing from a quartet of gleaming, floor-roaming trolleys.
Although not every dish on the “midcentury chophouse” menu will be served from the carts, they’re a big part of the shtick.
“There are about six to 10 dishes intimately involved in the trolley service, and twice as many will have some element of service where dishes are touched by captains at the table but not necessarily at trolleys,” Carbone says.
Dishes to be trotted out by captains clad in Tom Ford tuxedos include spit-roasted prime rib carved tableside and Dover sole Meunière skinned and boned in front of diners.
There’s also a scary-looking duck press on display — an increasingly rare device the owners went to New Orleans to find. Duck and other game birds, along with garlic, tomatoes and herbs, goes into the device; the juice thus produced is used to sauce freshly made egg noodles.
Owners Major Food Group call it a “more fun than formal” approach to the Philip Johnson-designed dining temples. The Grill is opening for dinner first, with lunch to come later. The seafood-oriented Pool room, anchored by the square, marble pond where celebs such as Sophia Loren were known to take dips, will have to wait for late summer.
But — whoa! —The Grill, where the “power lunch” was invented, is opening for dinner first?
Asked if that was to make a statement that The Grill and The Pool weren’t trying to revive the Four Seasons, which closed last July, MFG co-managing partner Jeff Zalaznick replies, “Yes.”
Even so, the 60 year-old venues’ immortal design makes it easy to conflate the present with the past. The architectural grandeur is enhanced by architect Annabelle Selldorf’s loving restoration done under the Landmark Preservation Commission’s watchful eye.
If you feared that art-loving landlord Aby Rosen might bury the room’s austere geometry under Andy Warhol prints, relax.
Yes, a floral arrangement has been needlessly inserted between the great square bar and the Richard Lippold brass-rods sculpture overhead. But despite that, and such flourishes as a pink-and-burgundy carpet and upholstered banquettes plusher than the setting needs, all the timeless, magnificent bones remain.
Walnut walls breathe the same big-city power they did during the Eisenhower administration; aluminum-chain curtains convey optimism as they undulate perpetually upwards; a cracked-glass partition discreetly shields diners from the bar crowd behind it.
It’s all so blessedly familiar, I half-expect prankish Four Seasons co-owner Julian Niccolini, who’s busy getting his new Four Seasons revival at 280 Park Ave. ready, to pop out of the woodwork.
Still, it will be interesting to see how today’s casual-obsessed younger diners — even 60-plus fogeys like me — take to the old-is-new-again menu and tableside rituals. Will a fleet of trolleys strike customers who are likely to spend up to $150-plus a head as mere gimmicks?
Younger New Yorkers’ idea of “tableside service” involves exhibitionist guacamole prep and noisy zabaglione-whisking.
The past few years have seen only a modest comeback of the style — cheese-and-salumi slicing at Mario Batali’s La Sirena, a fancy beet laboriously dismantled before your eyes at Agern. There’s also a cart used for certain dishes at MFG’s Italian-American-themed Carbone downtown. But, “We really just dabble in it there,” Carbone tells The Post.
Rich Torrisi, Carbone’s pal and partner who will head the kitchen at The Pool, says the rule for a trolley should be, “Is it useful? Is it a better idea to flambé on the floor, or to carve prime rib on the floor? Otherwise, it’s just a show.”
And, since tableside prep makes people self-conscious or impatient if servers lack confidence or finesse, Carbone has brought in an expert from his eponymous Thompson Street place, Steven Sartuche, to drill and steer the floor crew.
Carbone’s also behind the music soundtrack, which he says the room will have for the first time in its history.
“I made a playlist from the late 1950s and early ’60s,” he says. It’s obviously not the Italian favorites of Carbone downtown, but mainly jazz and some R&B — “Buddy Rich, Dave Brubeck, Nina Simone.”
Let the music play on — and let The Grill and The Pool thrive for as long as the seasons turn.
The tableside dishes:
Changing seasons: Inside the restaurant’s history
1959: Launched by Restaurant Associates (RA), led by Joe Baum, the Four Seasons is the first major restaurant to take American cuisine seriously, its menu overseen by the legendary James Beard.
1960s: Food sinks to tourist levels and the restaurant loses money. RA props it up with profits from tacky Hawaii Kai in Times Square.
1973: RA sells Four Seasons to its top managers, Paul Kovi and Tom Margittai.
1970s-’80s: As the city crumbles, the Four Seasons hits its stride as a bastion of stability and grace, home to the “power lunch.” New managers Alex von Bidder and Julian Niccolini lure the rich and mighty.
1989: City designates the Four Seasons, inside the Seagram Building, an interior landmark, over objections by building owners, the Bronfman family.
1995: Kovi and Margittai sell the Four Seasons to von Bidder and Niccolini, who steer it through a recession, mostly by keeping it in the news.
2000: Aby Rosen buys major stake in Seagram Building and, in 2011, takes full control of the building.
2011-2016: Rosen declines to renew restaurant’s lease, up in 2016. He contracts with Major Food Group to take over.
2015: The NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission shoots down several of Rosen’s requests for interior changes.
2016: Von Bidder and Niccolini announce plans to open a new Four Seasons (they own the name), at 280 Park Ave.
2017: The Grill and The Pool, different restaurants run by Major Food Group, open at 99 E. 52nd St. Vague plans made for reopening the former Brasserie, on the building’s 53rd Street side; yet to happen.
2017 or early 2018: The new “Four Seasons” to open at 280 Park Ave.