New York's Four Seasons Restaurant will close less than a year after its reopening | Food

The Four Seasons Restaurant in New York will close less than a year after its reopening, away from the Seagram Building, masterpiece of modern architecture that has housed its place of residence for nearly 60 years old and that it came to complete as a twentieth century summit. century of art, style and design.

In a statement to the New York Times, general manager Alex von Bidder said, "Unfortunately … the Four Seasons restaurant will close its doors the week of June 10th. We had the privilege of working with one of the best culinary teams and exceptional staff who have accompanied us during difficult times throughout our history. "

The last service will be on Tuesday noon.

The Four Seasons opened in 1959 inside the Park Avenue skyscraper, built by Bauhaus architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

The architect Philip Johnson was responsible for the dazzling interior of the restaurant, in which he was often. There were at different times of art, including Blue Poles, a major work by Jackson Pollock who is now at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, and a painting by pop artist James Rosenquist. A series of Mark Rothko's mural paintings commissioned for the restaurant was found at the Tate Modern in London.

The Four Seasons was aiming high with its food, but most commentators came to think that the menu was never really the goal of a restaurant, which became a stage for the high, the mighty and, after a meal and drinks, the powerful.

In 2016, on the brink of the Seagram's Four Seasons ejection and auction of its content, selling that grossed $ 4.1 million, critic Jason Farago rhapsodized for The Guardian: "L & # The culmination of the restaurant was the 1970s. Outside, the city arrived a few days after bankruptcy and the streets were suffocated by crime. Inside, moguls and socialites organized a choreographed show of restaurants and tables worthy of the old French regime.

"The New York publishing world is interested in Grill Room, as are magazine publishers whose expense accounts are greater than the full budgets of today's viral content slaughterhouses. ("I signed each of my stuff in the kiosks over swordfish and salad," says Tina Brown.

But the Four Seasons was not just about luxury or frivolity. In a lecture given at the restaurant in 1997, the architecture critic Paul Goldberger praised his "incredible sequence of spaces, from the entrance of the ground floor to the miesian stairwell hall through the entrance hall, and then to the front, maybe up to the balcony; or left and across the travertine corridor with the Picbado to the billiard room.

"In each case, a magnificent architectural procession, through a monumental space – all of this proves that our time had not totally abandoned monumentality."

Manhattan has recently evoked the fate of a particularly monumental film, the Picbado, huge stage curtain of the ballet The Tricorn. He found himself in the New York Historical Society. And now, inevitably, the Four Seasons will also be part of the story.

After losing its lease to the Seagram under new owner Aby Rosen, the restaurant changed angles and opened on East 49th Street in August 2018. Then, in December, Julian Niccolini, Von's longtime partner Bidder, resigned following allegations of badual conduct.

This week, Von Bidder told the Times that it was "difficult to measure" the impact of Niccolini's departure. More prosaically, he said that "the world of catering has changed" and that the Four Seasons had met the same fate as restaurants from all walks of life seeking to thrive in the jungle of Manhattan.

He "just could not get there," he said, when it came to "doing enough business to satisfy" his investors.

in the the limits of a tweet, Goldberger answered the news.

"We are losing a part of the soul of New York."