The Restaurant Associates group strikes a deal with Seagram chairman Samuel Bronfman to open a restaurant on the ground floor and lower level of Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building. Despite the popularity of European fine dining establishments in New York at the time, Restaurant Associates VP Joe Baum wants to offer a menu of contemporary American fare. James Beard helps put together a recipe testing team, which includes future Times critic Mimi Sheraton. Baum envisions a menu that reflects the seasons, and he seeks out only the best ingredients available. Sheraton reflects on the pre-opening phase for Vanity Fair: "Baum charged me with scouring books and magazines for seasonal foods—fiddlehead ferns, ramps, and shad for spring; pomegranates, walnuts still in their velvety green husks, and game for fall. He was interested in the food lore of all countries and cultures—rice-harvest rites in Indonesia, the custom of eating bitter greens in springtime in the Pennsylvania Dutch country as well as along the Adriatic shores of Apulia, the serving of chervil soup in Germany on Holy Thursday." Executive chef Albert Stockli creates the opening menus. Emil Antonucci designs the art for the menus, napkins, and matchbooks. Philip Johnson is the architect, and William Pahlmann works on the interior design. Garth and Ada Louise Huxtable create the glass and silver service-pieces. After Pablo Picasso turns down a request to create bronze trees for the main dining room, the team decides to have trees that will be swapped out four times a year. The restaurant costs $4.5 million to open, which William Grimes notes makes it "the most expensive restaurant in the city’s history."

Craig Claiborne writes a review of the restaurant just a few months into its run. The Times critic notes: "Both in décor and in menu, it is spectacular, modern, and audacious. It is expensive and opulent, and it's perhaps the most exciting restaurant to open in New York within the last two decades. On the whole, the cuisine is not exquisite in the sense that la grande cuisine francaise at its superlative best is exquisite."

[Photo: Curbed NY]

President John F. Kennedy holds a $1,000-a-plate Democratic Party fundraiser at The Four Seasons. It's his birthday, and immediately following dinner, he heads to Madison Square Garden where one of his dinner guests, Marilyn Monroe, performs "Happy Birthday, Mr. President." [Photo: Curbed NY]

In a review for New York, Gael Greene notes that after 11 years, The Four Seasons "has ripened and mellowed with age." Gael writes: "Like New York the city, it can be conquered. Some days the soaring canyon of steel-and marble-delineated space seems almost cozy. And though the city rots, this most New York of restaurants never unlaxes. The service is crisply Fred Astaire. The big production numbers – watch the raw mushroom-salad-tossing number – remain sharp. Admitted, the service plates are disgracefully shabby. But the evening I spied a cockroach scuttling across the illuminated table plan at the pool room entrance, I felt neither threatened nor appalled nor even mildly offended. I found that cockroach curiously reassuring. This was New York and we both belonged."

Restaurant Associates’ VP of fine dining Tom Margittai and Four Seasons director Paul Kovi buy the restaurant and transform the Bar Room into the Grill Room. They introduce a menu that will appeal to the media crowd. The duo hires Ron Holland and George Lois to create a full-page ad in the Times that shows the two restaurateurs shaking hands with the note: "We breathlessly announce that the two of us have taken over The Four Seasons," along with their signatures. In 1999, Lois tells Vanity Fair: "That’s how we said the restaurant was being run by individuals, not by a corporation." The Post’s Steve Cuozzo reflects on the impact of the 70s turn-around: "The Four Seasons dared to be at its best when the city was at its worst — when Times Square was a free-fire zone, Grand Central Terminal a squalid homeless camp and Central Park a dust bowl."

Swiss-born veteran hotelier Alex von Bidder is brought on to the team to work on banquet business at The Four Seasons.

Julian Niccolini, a Tuscan with experience working in European hotels, is hired to run the Grill Room. Niccolini recently told Lucky Peach about the changes during this era: "We served the full menu in the Pool Room; the menu in this room, the Grill Room, was smaller and less expensive. And nobody was promoting it at all. So we started putting things on the menu that were good for you, things that you could come in and eat every day and not gain weight. No butter, no cream; everything was very healthy. And we chose things that were simple to make, so that people could be out of here in an hour and fifteen minutes."

Simon & Schuster’s editor in chief Michael Korda writes an article for the Times titled "Le Plat Du Jour is Power," about how media power players are flocking to restaurants like the Four Seasons for business lunches: "At present, it seems to me that the most powerful place to eat lunch in town (apart from the private dining rooms of the more interesting corporate presidents and bankers) is the grill room of The Four Seasons." Korda also noted: "Sauces of any kind are out, and austerity is in, the main thing being to prove first that you are the kind of person who spends $50 on lunch for two because it's no more than your due as, a success. and second that you're not doing it for the pleasure of eating, Which is for the tourists."

Esquire publishes Lee Eisenberg’s article "America’s Most Powerful Lunch," which includes an annotated seating chart of the Grill Room. Eisenberg writes: "Understand that it isn’t the head of the company who lunches in the Bar Room; more likely it is the head thinker of a shop. Editors, creative directors, designers, wine aficionados — these are the lords and ladies who lunch." In this article, Kovi remarks: "We assembled a staff that was friendly and polite. There would be no captains, no carving, no table side cooking, nothing to remind one of grand-luxe service." Margittai also describes the vision for the Grill Room menu: "We decided that we would grill over charcoal only. So we built an eight-foot-long grill and trained Japanese cooks how to prepare fish, meat, and vegetables, to our specifications."

The Four Seasons becomes an interior landmark according to The New York City Landmarks Preservation Committee.

With retirement on their minds, Tom Margittai and Paul Kovi sell their majority interest in The Four Seasons to Joseph E. Seagram & Sons Inc. Julian Niccolini and Alex von Bidder retain a minority ownership in the deal, and they plan to keep running the dining room. Von Bidder tells Florence Fabricant that "the restaurant will remain the same."

The Four Seasons receives the Outstanding Restaurant honor at the James Beard Foundation Awards. [Photo: Curbed NY]

Real estate heavy hitter Aby Rosen buys the Seagram Building with partner Michael Fuchs. [Photo: Facebook]

Rosen and the Landmarks Conservancy lock horns over the fate of "La Tricone," a Picasso tapestry in the space that adjoins the Pool Room and the Grill Room. Rosen wants it taken down so he can repair the wall behind it, but the Conservancy fears that the tapestry will be damaged once it's removed. Rosen eventually agrees to pay for the removal and restoration of the tapestry. This process is estimated to cost $1.6 million. [Photo: The Four Seasons]

Aby Rosen and RFP decide not to renew the lease for The Four Seasons. Two months later, the Major Food Group announces plans to open a new restaurant in the Four Seasons space.

A 28-year-old family friend of Julian Niccolini accuses the restaurateur of molesting her at a party at the restaurant. The victim tells the police that he grabbed her breasts, tried to take off her bra, and touched her through her underwear. Julian Niccolini pleads guilty to misdemeanor assault. As part of his deal with the prosecutors, Niccolini does not serve any jail time.

With a closing date on the horizon, Niccolini and von Bidder announce plans to reopen The Four Seasons inside a 19,000 square-foot space at 280 Park Avenue in 2017. The restaurants's grand finale is slated for July 16, and a restaurant auction will be held on July 26.