When the patron saint of the Four Seasons’ Grill Room came down last year—a 19-by-20-foot Picasso curtain that had presided over the dining room since 1959—formal “power lunching,” it appeared to many New Yorkers, had finally run its course. Before the Four Seasons’ Picasso was furled, a lunch here wasn’t just a meal, but the meal (“all grace, all business, nonfattening,” Esquire recounted in 1979), where handshake deals were made, contracts closed, and ideas digested as easily as the restaurant’s unfussy food: gravlax with dill sauce and slivered carrots plated just so, chicken salad with a rosette of cucumber and a fan of sugar snaps.
By Cloe Kent