WELL SERVED
POPPY at the FOUR SEASONS A SWEET FAREWELL TO THE “COTTON CANDY” RESTAURANT by Alix Browne illustrations by Hilary Knight
I can’t remember the first time I ate at a grown-up restaurant. It might have been on a trip to Paris when I was 13. My mother, who considered herself something of a foodie even back then, took me to both Jamin and La Tour d’Argent. I was a finicky eater to say the least, but my palate had expanded far enough to include lamb chops, so it was reasonably safe to take me anywhere French. At Tour d’Argent, I ordered the Poulet de Bresse. None of their famous pressed duck for me, merci.
we don’t go now, she may never get to go. The Four Seasons was scheduled to close as part of a major overhaul of the space by Aby Rosen, whose real estate company owns the iconic Mies van der Rohe-designed Seagram Building, where the restaurant had been housed since 1959. There was no guarantee that the venerable tradition of cotton candy would be upheld when the new restaurateurs took over. So I made a reservation for two at 6 p.m. on a Friday night, in the Pool Room.
My daughter Poppy currently subsists on a diet not dissimiliar to airplane food: pasta, chicken, or fish—prepared in the most unimaginative manner possible. If I am being generous, I might call her a purist.
I had my own reasons to be nostalgic. When I was a young writer, Art Cooper, then editor-in-chief of GQ and a fixture of the power scene in the restaurant’s clubby Grill Room, had taken me to lunch there before hiring me as an associate editor at the magazine. We sat at his regular table, and he pointed out all the bigwigs from the worlds of media, finance, and politics seated around us. I couldn’t tell if he was testing me or just showing off by having lunch with a woman half his age. Maybe a little of both. (Years later, Cooper would suffer a fatal stroke as he sat enjoying his last meal at that very same table.)
The only restaurant she will go to willingly is Edward’s, a burger joint near our apartment in Tribeca with an extensive kids’ menu. I can’t blame her. Over the years she has become a regular. She and Edward are on a first-name basis, the host calls her “Princess,” and she always gets her favorite corner booth—the one by the register, not the one next to the door, in case you were wondering.
“It’s the most beautiful room in all of New York City,” I told Poppy of the Pool Room, the architect Philip Johnson’s ode to the International Style, anchored by four potted trees that changed regularly in accordance with the seasons and oriented around an actual white marble pool. Metal bead curtains gave the impression of water gently cascading up the floor-to-ceiling windows.
So it surprised me somewhat when for the past couple of months anytime I asked Poppy if she wanted to go out for dinner, she would respond, “Let’s go to the cotton candy restaurant!” Okay, maybe not so surprising for a 6-year-old to want to go to a restaurant that serves cotton candy. Of course, the restaurant in question was the Four Seasons. I had no idea she even knew it existed.
Poppy was full of questions, mostly about the pool. Were there fish or turtles in it? Did people swim in it? Could we sit next to it?
Now the Four Seasons was not the kind of place you could casually drop by on a weeknight with a child in tow. But after the fourth or fifth or tenth ask, I finally thought, If
As it turned out, we were not seated anywhere near the pool, but on the perimeter of the room facing inward,
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