The Fifth Season

At Four Twenty Five, two super-chefs take aim at midtown’s most famous dining room.

- MATTHEW SCHNEIER

WHO WOULD DARE try to kill the Grill? Jean-Georges Vongerichten, the proprietor of Four Twenty-Five, the restaurant in the new 425 Park Avenue office tower at East 56th, would never be so tactless as to say so, but I suspect that's the ambition. The two restaurants are within spitting distance of each other. Each has its braggable architects (Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson for the Grill, né The Four Seasons;

Lord Norman Foster for Four Twenty Five) and majordomos (Major Food Group for the former; Vongerichten for the latter), and both were bankrolled by a beneficent realestate suzerain (Aby Rosen; David Levinson and Robert Lapidus). Even the designs have an eerie echo: Fluttering, diaphanous curtains soften the headlights from the avenue, much as Marie Nichols's famous wovenaluminum curtains do on 52nd, and, scaling Four Twenty Five's lushly carpeted staircase to its hovering dining room, I was reminded of the similar ascent in the Seagram Building.

425 Park Avenue was completed in 2022. My colleague Justin Davidson describes Foster's buildings, including this one, as "coolly sexy and seductively menacing." The menace at the restaurant has been dialed down to plush softness and dim ease. The lobby bar may fill nightly with local financerati (much of the building is leased to Citadel, Ken Griffin's hedge fund), but they sip their signature martinis under the cheerfully hectic brushstrokes of an enormous Larry Poons selected by Levinson. Among Abstract Expressionist trophies, this is about as un-menacing as it gets: Poons is to Pollock as Barney is to Jurassic Park.