Henry Kissinger just wants his crab cakes, darn it!
When executive chef Fabio Trabocchi abruptly departed the Four Seasons this month after just three months on the job, it was the talk of New York’s restaurant world.
Why had the highly regarded chef — who earned three stars from the Times and one from Michelin while at Fiamma, a 2009 casualty of the financial meltdown — parted ways with the fabled Midtown powerhouse after barely one season?
Chalk it up to taste. On the one hand, Trabocchi’s “sashimi” of ahi tuna, Kumamoto oysters and sorrel sauce. On the other, the dishes that the East 52nd Street landmark has served since opening in 1959.
“There were issues with [some longtime] customers,” says one restaurant insider. “They complained that the food was not the same. They want grilled fish, steamed vegetables — hospital food.”
Brought in to add buzz to the menu and return the restaurant to its former three-star status, Trabocchi may have done too much too soon. While the famous crab cakes were never taken off the menu, classic dishes jockeyed for space with newfangled additions like spaghetti with sea urchin or crab and spicy chilis, much to the dismay of regulars.
“There are customers who have been coming in every day for 30 years — they spend thousands of dollars a week — they name their own salad or steak. It’s hard to break that,” says the source.
At the Four Seasons, if a regular wants endive and tomatoes out of season, the kitchen runs out to fetch them. It is this sort of high-touch service that has made the landmark a destination for New York’s rich and powerful for more than 50 years.
“These people expect good food, but they want their crab cake, they want their salad and their billi bi [creamy mussel soup] — they’re not looking for eccentric or imaginative food,” says guidebook magnate and Four Seasons regular Tim Zagat.
While Trabocchi made a good impression at his audition, with a non-stop parade of haute dishes, the honeymoon didn’t last long with owners Julian Niccolini and Alex Von Bidder. “There was always some complaint that an older person would [say] — too salty, too small, too much, I don’t get it,” says the restaurant insider.
Meanwhile, a corporate source says the owners were horrified to learn that the kitchen was using lard — again pointing to a possible generation divide. Pork fat is a fashionable ingredient with modern-day foodies but would likely shock regulars accustomed to the restaurant’s longtime emphasis on light, healthy fare.
Food costs may have also been an issue. Trabocchi has always been expensive — according to a source from his days at DC’s critically acclaimed Maestro, he ran the restaurant like it was in spare-no-expense Las Vegas — but he did get results. Recent reports from those who’ve dined at the Four Seasons have been overwhelmingly positive but in the end, finances may have trumped stars.
“The Four Seasons wasn’t ready for a chef like Fabio,” says a longtime industry professional. “As the changes started happening, it didn’t become a positive. It became a negative. Fabio tried and they tried. Unfortunately, at the end of the day, it didn’t work out. It’s sad.”
Or perhaps management remembered the disastrous tenure of chef Anne Rosenzweig at ’21,’ who in 1987 was given carte blanche to change the menu and dared add a pat of green butter to the center of the house hamburger.
In a year when iconic restaurants like the Rainbow Room and Tavern on the Green closed, there’s a chill among New York’s old guard.
Going “Iron Chef” on the dishes is particularly risky for the Four Seasons.
Legendary restaurateur Joseph Baum opened the dazzlingly modernist restaurant with a then-revolutionary premise — it would serve a seasonal menu with an American, rather than French, focus.
The gorgeous multimillion-dollar setting designed by Philip Johnson and Mies van der Rohe features soaring walnut-paneled walls, world-class works of art, and Eero Saarinen furniture.
From the start, it attracted an illustrious crowd. In 1962, John F. Kennedy celebrated his 45th-birthday dinner there. By the 1970s, the restaurant’s Grill Room became the setting for New York’s original “power lunch.”
And at last year’s 50th anniversary party, a glittering cast of characters — Ralph Lauren, Henry Kissinger, Barry Diller — packed into the Pool Room to swill champagne. On any given lunch hour, you can still glimpse everyone from politicians to TV stars at the next table.
Both Trabocchi and the Four Seasons maintain that the split was “amicable” and due to “philosophical differences.”
Whether the split was actually the result of clashing egos, a generation gap, freewheeling spending, the vagaries of running a high-volume restaurant or internal strife with the unionized kitchen staff is unclear — though all have been floated by various parties as potential reasons for the split.
But an online comment dated from Dec. 30 on a little-known food blog Docsconz, written by Niccolini’s daughter, Keiko, may have best expressed the philosophical divide: “It is a restaurant with a soul of its own, not a new place seeking an image or identity. If Mr. Trabocchi intends to bring a revolutionary climate to a restaurant and is seeking a great stage to promote himself, it should be at a restaurant that he owns himself. The Four Seasons has thrived as New York’s arbiter of taste for the last 50 years.”
So what will the next chapter of the Four Seasons bring?
“I guess they will go back to the Four Seasons being the Four Seasons,” says the industry insider. “Simple food, excellent clientele, elegant room — and that’s it.”