Major Food Group Takes Over The Four Seasons

Major Food Group- the 3 man team behind Parm, Carbone, Santina, Dirty French, ZZ’s Clam Bar, Sadelle’s, embark on a “quixotic quest” to re-vamp the infamous Four Season’s dining room.

The decision to split the old Four Seasons into two separate entities with markedly divergent offerings is a way of spreading bets and managing expectations. A trickier problem, according to fellow restaurateurs, is demand. Zalaznick estimates the average cover at the Grill and Pool will be around $150 per person at dinner (including wine) — resulting in a back-of-the-envelope combined take of about $100,000 a day, or something like $36 million per year. But that requires both dining rooms to average two and a half seatings at every table at dinner, and that would require not merely serving remarkable food, but pulling off the kind of personalized service The Four Seasons was beloved for.

The budget for putting the new restaurants in the Seagram Building is $30 million. (It includes eventually opening a third Major Food Group restaurant, in the home of Brasserie, which occupied the basement level on the opposite side of the building.) Rosen said he considered turning The Four Seasons space into a private club. Instead, he and Zalaznick raised money from the hedge-fund and real-estate sectors and other investors to finance the cost of renovations. “The idea of raising the renovation money from investors was so we can have a similar effect — so that there are patrons who feel an attachment.” He has 98 investor-patrons so far. “So it’s like $300,000 per person, which is easy.”

Read the lengthly 6,000 word article here