I Actually Like the French Title of my Story About the Four Seasons Better: “Mon Restaurant:

This story originally appeared in the famous Kimye cover of L’Officiel Hommes in 2013

Furthering my series of stories I originally published in French. Here’s the English translations to my piece about the Four Seasons from L’Officiel Hommes in Paris.

When you have an occasion to mark and when you want to mark it with someone special and when that someone special is also paying: there is no place like The Four Seasons in New York City.

“It was there that we first heard the director Scorcese wanted to adapt Nora’s husband’s book into the movie Goodfellas.” says writer Gay Talese who has dined there for over 50 years since it opened in 1959. He and his wife Nan often made a foursome with the writer Nora Ephron and her husband Nicholas Pileggi. “We came back after the premier of Nora’s When Harry Met Sally.” Ephron had a regular table by the fountain in what regulars called “the pool room” until she died last year. “It is the kind of place where you knew the name of the person who was on the other end of the phone taking your reservation and many of the regulars even knew their table numbers.”

Few buildings in New York City become landmarks, but for the past 30 years the only number you needed to know was that of Julian Niccolini, the Italian born son of a grocer who has helmed the space ever since. He likes to play games with his guests, seating the recently divorced next to each other and accompanying his vacationing guests on their private jets to their private islands as easily as he does in his own private dining rooms. The famed Marilyn Monroe “Happy Birthday Mr. President” was born here in a private room.

When it first opened, the Seagram Building was the most expensive skyscraper ever built. Itself replacing the five-story Steinway & Sons piano factory. Originally the artist Mark Rothko was commissioned to paint the murals for the restaurant and instead set about, in his words, “painting something that will ruin the appetite of every son-of-a-bitch who ever eats in that room. If the restaurant would refuse to put up my murals, that would be the ultimate compliment. But they won’t. People can stand anything these days.”

Indeed. While other American French restaurants of the time were paying customs duties on canned sauces from the Continent, The Four Seasons simply took their best techniques and went after the best food. Pick any topic of the fetishized menus of today: local, free range, farm-to-table (now all the rage) the only question for the last 50 years was: how did it taste? If it worked: they served it.

One thing has always remained unchanged: Your grandparents could go here for a landmark occasion like their honeymoon and the come back on their fiftieth anniversary. Their favorite dishes from their first visit would be gone, but the place would still bring back happy memories. Your grandparents wouldn’t marvel at how things have stayed the same for 25 years, but how much they’ve changed together in that time. And since the whole Seagram’s building has been designated a landmark, it will still be there for another fifty years.