Some new restaurants you can encounter and assess with dispassionate objectivity. Some you've been waiting to go to your whole life.
I'm being literal. In the early 1980s, for their wedding anniversary, my parents went to The Four Seasons for dinner. This was a big deal in our house. They had been once before, soon after getting married in 1965. My mother's salary then, as a newly minted New York City public-school teacher assigned to an elementary school in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, was $5,300 before taxes; my father, variously a cabdriver, optician, civil servant, and eventually CPA, could not have earned much more. Luckily, the pre-theater prix fixe menu was $16.95, a number that nevertheless required, if not scrimping, then at least a deep breath at a time when the fried-shrimp dinner at Lundy Bros., closer to home in Sheepshead Bay, cost a mere three bucks.
The return visit to The Four Seasons was the subject of anticipatory discussion for months and great excitement when the day finally arrived. I've never entirely shaken the glow that the name of the restaurant took on. Throughout my childhood, I would occasionally take out the slender matchbook they had brought home and stuffed in a drawer, running a finger over the famous logo of four trees in spring, summer, autumn, and winter. And whenever my brother or I would misbehave or commit a table faux pas, it would elicit the same withering response from my parents: “You are not ready for The Four Seasons.”
It was a decade or so before I finally made it through the doors of the Seagram Building, up Philip Johnson's famous staircase and into The Four Seasons for the first time. It was a party—I can't recall what for, except that the Yankees were all there. I remember Paul O'Neill, in one of those abominable melted-ice-cream Cosby sweaters popular among white ballplayers in the late '90s, standing like an overgrown kid near the buffet, his plate stacked high with crab legs. In awe, I wandered back and forth between the walnut-paneled Grill Room and the Pool Room, with its bubbling marble bath. I gazed up at the Richard Lippold sculpture of brass rods, suspended over the bar. I surreptitiously fingered the famous window treatments, ascending curtains of rippling beads, slung like jewelry across a belly dancer's midriff. More than a few of these circuits included stops at the open bar. At one point, holding a heavy rocks glass filled with whiskey, I turned a corner into the hallway that connected the two dining rooms and walked directly into Joe Torre. The glass slipped out of my hand and hit the floor at his feet, exploding like a grenade. By the time I looked up, Torre had fled and a team of servers had swooped in with towels and brooms. I stood there alone, watching them sweep, the awful knowledge coursing through me: I. Was. Not. Ready.
I relate these stories to make the point that if you are a New Yorker of any long standing, The Four Seasons was likely to occupy some part of your psychic landscape—even if your version of New York was many physical and metaphorical miles from the one to which the restaurant once acted as a de facto canteen. Was because The Four Seasons technically ceased operations in the Seagram Building in July 2016, replaced this May by two new restaurants in the same space. Appropriately, if un-Google-ably, they are named The Pool and The Grill. The owners of The Four Seasons name plan to open their own new version a few blocks away, but until proven otherwise, it's the space, not the moniker, that holds the magic.
Even so, there haven't been many points in the past two decades when goings-on in the Seagram Building would have been considered big dining-world news, much less the restaurant story of the year. One more memory I have is of being at Food & Wine's Best New Chefs awards, in 2007, the same day, coincidentally, that Frank Bruni had reviewed The Four Seasons for The New York Times, cutting the place's rating from three stars to two. Pete Wells, then the Times's dining editor, was there, and we were talking about what could possibly make the restaurant relevant again. A younger chef, maybe? “What about him?” Pete said, pointing across the room to where David Chang was gloomily plating an endless number of the pork buns that had won him his own Best New Chef award the previous year. We imagined koji-spiked vichyssoise, bao buns stuffed with duck à l'orange. And then we laughed and laughed. Because in the spring of 2007, what could've been more ridiculous? The Revolution of the Line Cooks was well under way, with chefs fleeing everything The Four Seasons represented. They were stripping down, shedding dining-room conventions, shedding dining rooms altogether. The whole food world was getting younger, looser, more polyglot, farther downtown. To take a job like chef at The Four Seasons—in the fantastical case that it would even be offered—would be to disappear forever.
Ten years later, the narrative shows signs of once again being turned on its head. The Grill and The Pool are operated by Rich Torrisi and Mario Carbone, two fine-dining refugees who opened a tiny Italian-sandwich shop in SoHo and used it to launch an empire that has now stormed back uptown. It's hard not to see this as either the Revolution's final, capping victory or its Prince Hal–like betrayal.
One thing for sure is that The Grill and The Pool represent the apotheosis of what I think of as the New Nostalgia: a notable pendulum swing back toward the traditional rituals and comforts of fine dining. You see it 60 blocks south of The Grill and The Pool, at Le Coucou, which dares to propose that a French restaurant can be more formal than a bistro or brasserie and still hip; at the newest incarnation of the Beatrice Inn, where you can spend more than $700 on a whiskey-aged tomahawk steak; at 4 Charles Prime Rib; and at Minetta Tavern, which kicked off this counter-strain almost a decade ago.
These places reanimate the notion of dining out as a special occasion, replete with candles, tableside preparation, even—imagine!—tablecloths. Maybe it's the first wave of revolutionaries aging and finding themselves craving the kinds of nights out their parents once had. Maybe it's the desire for a deeper coddling in anxious times. Maybe we just realized we still need someplace to go on Valentine's Day.
I spent more on two Gibsons—pre-batched and washed with pickled-onion brine—while waiting for my party at The Grill this summer than my parents did on their entire first meal at The Four Seasons. That shouldn't be too surprising, and not just for reasons of inflation. In addition to the building's pedigree and the baseline insanity of what it costs to eat out in New York, Torrisi, Carbone, and their partner, Jeff Zalaznick, have long established themselves as breathtakingly bold upsellers. It took me an inordinate amount of time to realize the trio's company name, Major Food Group, was a pun, in part because the braggadocio seemed so on-brand. With the exception of its casual sandwich shop, Parm, the group's restaurants—Carbone, Santina, ZZ's Clam Bar, Dirty French, and Sadelle's—operate on the principle that, for a surprising number of people, the chance to drain one's pockets is a value-added proposition. Las Vegas has, of course, known this for a long time. When the boys opened a branch of Carbone in Vegas itself, I worried briefly that they might be giving the game away. (They seem to be surviving just fine.)
There have been times I've found the gouging obnoxious, and other times when I've reminded myself that New Yorkers who want to spend stupid amounts of money on dinner will certainly find a way to do so with or without the help of Major Food Group. In nearly every case, they'll get worse food for their trouble. The group may glorify an old-fashioned, elitist clubbiness (not to say cultivate a new-fashioned douchiness), but there's never any doubt that Torrisi and Carbone are real chefs or that they're working from a place of genuine respect and affection for ingredients, service, and restaurant history.
And in the Seagram Building, they have spaces that, for once, render the question of upsell moot. Put it this way: If you were to charge me an equivalent premium—say, $35—for a hot dog, but I got to eat it ensconced in the luster of The Grill, or beneath the huge Calder mobile slowly rotating over The Pool's bubbling tub—I'd probably say: “Yeah, seems fair.”
Don't misunderstand: The Grill and The Pool are still monuments to conspicuous wealth and luxury. There is no shortage of “while Rome burned” tableaux on which to seize, starting with the thousand Swords of Damocles literally dangling over the swells at the bar, in the form of Lippold's rods; if you're in a revolutionary frame of mind, they look like a phalanx of arrows arrested, Matrix-style, midflight, on their way to strike deep into the heart of capitalism. For what it's worth, The Grill is the only restaurant I've been to this year at which I seriously worried that Donald Trump might show up.
Still, there was a reason my mother and father—whose own first-generation parents would never have dreamed of taking seats, however temporary, among the beau monde—chose The Four Seasons for their foray into Manhattan dining, instead of Le Pavillon, or Lutèce, or any of the other formidable Frenchies that made up the top of the Manhattan food chain in those days. Joe Baum, the visionary leader of Restaurant Associates, which built the restaurant in 1959, explicitly wanted it to be a spectacle understood by all—and an American one at that. (The menu was very deliberately written in English rather than French.) The Four Seasons may never have been populist, but its Kennedy-esque aspirational vision was open to all.
And there's more here to fetishize than Mad Men power dynamics—of which it's worth pointing out that Mad Men was itself a critique. The Grill is a menu historian's fever dream. There's a long buffet table, festooned with elaborate decorative centerpieces, that feels like it came out of a 1960s-era Time-Life book. It's laden with reclaimed relics like anchovies on toast, clam cocktail, gleaming silver bowls of crudités on crushed ice. I could eat like this forever. Weirder, colder, fustier! Bring me jellied consommé! Cottage cheese! A glass of tomato juice! Aspic! Aspic! ASPIC!
Guéridons swarm the floor like cars at a demolition derby, bearing Dover sole, game birds, pepper-crusted ruby-hued slabs of prime rib. Meat is the currency of the New Nostalgia—in the form of either whole animals (chickens, ducks, rabbits) or cuts big, expensive, and beefy. If the Revolution was built on shimmering cubes of pork fat—the knowledge of which had apparently been lost in the dark time known as the Other White Meat Era—the flesh of the moment is good old-fashioned steer. Prime rib is its emblematic cut: at once stolid and ceremonial, decadent and dad-approved. The Oldsmobile of meats.
There is, of course, a paradox built into the New Nostalgia: Part of what it taps into is a yearning for a time when food simply didn't matter so much, when one could just eat without the exhausting business of knowing everything—about chef comings and goings, ingredients, trends, carbon footprints, all of it. It was once a mark of status for The Four Seasons Power-Lunchers to ostentatiously ignore their food, perhaps on the theory that if you cared too much about Lunch you weren't wielding enough Power. And yet who are we looking toward to re-create this golden era of food-as-fuel but famous chefs? After a generation of privileging the kitchen over the front of the house, that's who's left. And I suspect there's no going back, anyway. We already know too much. Which means The Grill will always be just as much of an art project as, say, Vespertine—the L.A. restaurant that opened around the same time, promising, among other things, to be “a place of cognitive dissonance that defies categorization…from a time that is yet to be, and a place that does not exist.”
Or, as a fresh-faced young banker happily put it to me as we nursed our Gibsons at The Grill's bar: “It's like Disneyland!”
So where does that leave The Pool? The nature of The Grill's fantasy is easy to understand. What Disney pavilion do you enter when you walk down that hallway toward its sister restaurant?
I'm still not sure, and I'm not sure Torrisi and Carbone are, either. Like members of a classic-rock band, the partners have the reputation of falling on either side of a heart-mind divide: Torrisi the brooding Lennon-like artiste, Carbone the McCartneyite purveyor of pop sunshine. The split is literalized in the side-by-side kitchens of The Grill, which is run by Carbone, and The Pool, which is Torrisi's domain. Like brothers sharing a bedroom, they've cut the space in half with different shades of flooring, the name of each restaurant, inlaid in brass, demarcating its side of the border.
There's no shortage of magic at The Pool. Under the spell of a few ounces of gin, awash in the burble of conversation and a counter-intuitively perfect soundtrack of early reggae, it's a wonderful space. It's also huge and, with less than a full house, risks feeling like a banquet hall after half the wedding has gone home. When the clock chimes midnight, you get the feeling that the dignified pool might turn back into a squalid Jacuzzi.
Simply put, it's a lot of room to fill, and Torrisi largely attempts to do so on the plate, rather than with elaborate service. The menu is almost exclusively seafood—though the Instagram money shot is a rose fashioned from shaved foie gras, served on a polished glass cube. There's a beet mille-feuille so charred and smoky you could close your eyes and believe you were eating barbecue. The fish entrées are immaculate, but they're also strangely dull. It pains me to wonder whether that's a function of seafood being unable to stand up to the meaty pleasures next door. It does suggest that The Pool requires a different approach to its quieter fireworks.
What I wanted, I realized, to my own surprise, was the very thing that The Grill and The Pool are a reaction against: for Torrisi to embrace his autocratic side and present a multi-course tasting menu. To do so would place the restaurants in fascinating dialogue with each other and nearly the entire spectrum of fine dining under one roof: New Nostalgia and Non Nostalgia, side by side.
You may have noticed something else that binds the list of New Nostalgia restaurants mentioned above. There are smatterings of the trend elsewhere in the country, but I don't think it's an accident that it is rooted in Manhattan—the place whose power and centrality have been most diminished by the proliferation of good food into the nation's every nook and cranny of the nation. The Grill and The Pool are the sound of the Empire striking back, Death Star–style. “Go ahead,” they, and the island they sit on, seem to roar. “Move the James Beard Awards to Chicago. Build a ‘Brooklyn’ in every reclaimed industrial downtown across the country. Point fingers at our stifling combination of high rent and toxic buzz addiction. Lure our chefs home to Minneapolis, to St. Louis, to Iowa City. Let them open nice neighborhood restaurants serving nice neighborhood food, take Sundays off, live in houses with porches, have the prospect of a happy, semi-prosperous normal adulthood. We will always have this”—“this” being shit-tons of money and extraordinary urban spaces. Those are Gotham's fossil fuels, and the Seagram Building is its Strategic Reserve. Is it any wonder it's been tapped just as the lights start to seriously flicker? These restaurants are everything great about New York, a triumph of the New York a kid might dream about growing up in the hinterlands of Deep Brooklyn. It remains to be seen whether they are also a last desperate howl before that greatness sinks, glittering like the Titanic, beneath the waves forever.
Brett Martin is a GQ correspondent.
A version of this story originally appeared in the December 2017 issue under the title 'Gorge Yourself on the New Nostalgia.'