Food Is Also Served

For Manhattan sophisticates (mostly from west of the Hudson), The Four Seasons up to now has been just another baroque concerto by Italian Composer Antonio Vivaldi, or a topflight restaurant patronized by Americans in Munich, Germany. This week Manhattanites and visitors to Manhattan got the offer of an even more baroque outlet. From now on, if money, showmanship, and just plain spectacle count for anything. The Four Seasons will be synonymous with the world's costliest restaurant ($4.5 million to build), which swung open its Park Avenue doors this week on the ground floor of the bronzed Seagram Building.

Rarely has New York, home of showplace restaurants (if not of showplace food), seen anything quite like The Four Seasons. Such architects as Mies van der Rohe. Eero Saarinen and Philip Johnson helped to arrange its five lavish dining rooms (two public, three private). Fifteen trees of different and exotic species ranging up to 18 feet tall wave in the breeze, and $50,000 worth of foliage, from cheese plants to Ficus trees, crowd the Mies chairs and Johnson tables. The walls are covered with an original Jackson Pollock spatter painting called Blue Poles, three surrealistic tapestries by Joan Miro, a stage curtain painted by Picasso.

Violets in Snow. Following the seasonal theme, most everything in the restaurant will change with the solstices and equinoxes: dishes, flowers, waiters' uniforms, trees (which will be uprooted and replaced four times a year). Serving the 450 customers seated at one time will be 25 chefs and bakers and a battalion of 125 cummerbunded captains, waiters, wine stewards, barmen and busboys.

The Four Seasons also has food. From goose to mousse, it has one of the highest-priced--and most exotic--menus in high-priced Manhattan, in league with Chambord, Le Pavilion, Colony, Brussels, "21." A typical dinner for two, from Sweet and Sour Pike in Tarragon Aspic ($2.25) through Piccata of Piglet in Pastry ($5.25), to genuine Violets in Summer Snow ($1.75), can easily cost up to $70 with drinks and tips. Seasonal foods and delicacies from all over the world are rushed to the restaurant by plane; its $100,000 wine cellar holds 15,000 bottles. If a visitor can not wait for the fun to begin, he can pluck a free sausage off a small tree as he takes his seat.

Giving His All. The outfit that cooked up The Four Seasons' blend of slick spectacle and lofty cuisine is Restaurant Associates Inc., a fast-rising restaurant group that specializes in putting showmanship and science into the eating business. R.A. says it carried out close to three years of "depth research" in preparing The Four Seasons. President Jerome Brody, 36, and a squad of top executives swung through Europe, the Far East, Polynesia, dipping their manicured fingers into the pots of the world's better restaurants. Bagel-waisted Vice President Joseph Baum, 38, gave his all to the cause; he gained 15 lbs. in the five hectic weeks before opening night.

Brody took over a family-owned chain of dispirited beaneries in Manhattan (Riker's) at 25, when three of its top executives died of heart attacks within 18 months. (Says he: "It was tough; I started at the top.") He surprised Riker's diners with 88-c- blue-plate specials cooked in wine (beef in Burgundy, haddock in sauterne, etc.), did well enough to win the concession for the Newark Airport restaurant. He picked up the lease for the money-losing Hawaiian Room of Manhattan's Hotel Lexington, made it into a gold mine. Late in 1957 Brody opened Manhattan's pretentious Forum of the Twelve Caesars, and this summer, for $2,500,000, bought tourist-luring Leone's, whose $3,800,000-a-year take is one of the world's highest.

The Four Seasons is by far Brody's biggest deal. With expense accounts and the rush for luxury, he expects the restaurant to operate at a profit within six months, help raise R.A.'s volume from last year's $10 million to $15 million in 1960.

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