The announcement that the chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten was opening a restaurant in a glassy skyscraper on Park Avenue didn’t surprise me. A madly prolific international restaurateur, he seems to open restaurants like browser tabs (56 to date). My ears perked up when I heard that the new place, Four Twenty Five, was to be a haute cuisine restaurant, Mr. Vongerichten’s first in New York City since 1997, when he debuted the dizzyingly innovative, four-star Jean-Georges.
But when I learned that the kitchen would be helmed by Jonathan Benno, the Per Se veteran whose own celebrated restaurants, Benno and Leonelli, sadly closed during the pandemic? That was a shock.
Two megawatt celebrity chefs in one kitchen is practically unheard-of, besides being proverbially too many. And this particular pairing is doubly unexpected, because while Mr. Vongerichten is a notorious renegade, famous for his boldly spiced, Asian-inflected global cuisine, Mr. Benno is an ingredient-driven purist, hewing closer to French and Italian tradition. Translating all of these influences into a cohesive menu is a big challenge. Would their disparate styles emulsify, like wine and butter, into a beautiful beurre blanc? Or would the mixture break?
At first glance, Four Twenty Five seems to be playing it safe. Fluke crudo, baby beets and winter squash agnolotti are all comfortingly familiar, verging on dull. You can order the obligatory Wagyu beef as a tenderloin or a strip steak, depending on your penchant for chewing and the depth of your pockets (the tenderloin is $84 and the strip is $118). Throw in the butter-poached lobster and caviar for the expense-account crowd, and pretty much all the usual boxes have been ticked.
But Mr. Vongerichten and Mr. Benno are too exuberantly talented to leave it at that. And together, they’ve transformed a fine-dining punch list into an alchemically rich menu that goes to great lengths to seduce. Both crowd-pleasing and daring, it features food that amuses you, delights you, inspires you to explore corners of your appetite you didn’t know you had. Four Twenty Five is not a restaurant that forces you out of your comfort zone, but it doesn’t leave you stranded there, either, staring into your Chardonnay.
The chefs shatter expectations every chance they get. They take fluke crudo, whose pale slices are usually eaten with a fork, and turn it into finger food. It arrives minced into a tartare, sharpened with citrus and softened with tahini, for you to roll into minty shiso leaves and eat by hand.
The lobster goes in the other direction. Four Twenty Five’s preparation is based on Singaporean pepper crab, a pungent, saucy street food traditionally sucked sloppily out of the shells. Four Twenty Five has refined it into a sweet and buttery lobster dish you eat daintily with a fork. But it keeps the explosive sauce — an accelerant of peppercorns, fermented black beans, ginger and scallions whose high Scoville rating sears the sinuses, even as a dash of sweet soy soothes them again.
Improbably, it’s the baby beets that steal the show. The plate may look a little froufrou, its mosaic of rosy, gold and scarlet scattered with lacy herbs and dabbed with clouds of coconut milk curd. The beets themselves, though, are extraordinary, every sphere maintaining a distinct character; some fruitlike and sweet, others earthy and juicy, some mild, some stronger. There are bits of apple, too, which you’d expect to be the sweetest element on the plate. But pickled in sherry vinegar, they’re tangy enough to make you squint, a bracing counterpoint to the symphonic earthiness of the beets.
That forthright smack of acidity is all over the menu: a drizzle of Champagne vinegar dressing a retro peekytoe crab salad topped with fat rings of golden fried onions; yuzu, ginger and serrano blended into a verdant sauce for a thick puck of seared hake; a gorgeously pink duck breast with impossibly crisp skin, surrounded by a red curry mustard sauce spiked with the gentian slap of Suze liqueur.
If you want to hunker down in your comfort zone, the pastas are a safe space. The agnolotti with winter squash, amaretti and brown butter is all sweet plushness, gently zhuzhed by the frizzled shiitake agrodolce, which snaps with that characteristic tang. It is impossible not to love. While slightly farther afield, the uni spaghetti is generously dolloped with pristine lobes of briny, creamy sea urchin that refreshes like an ocean plunge.
It’s food that doesn’t just please, it woos. Four Twenty Five’s dishes go out of their way to meet you where you are before they lead you somewhere else. And just so no one is left out, most of the dishes are available at both dinner and lunch.
Lunchtime is filled with hushed business negotiations and couture. Dinner is more of a scene.
On a Thursday night in December, the double-height lounge area downstairs was lively with well-heeled holiday revelers. A noisy coterie of Midtown lawyers clustered around the bar, extending an office holiday party with olive oil-washed vodka martinis. A couple of chic, waifish scions with MoMA shopping bags mutely appraised the 24-foot Larry Poons painting above the bar, nursing foie gras-infused old-fashioneds. A multigenerational family lifted Champagne flutes to their patriarch in a tweed blazer. Each group was ushered in turn, like Wagnerian gods, up the sweeping, bronze-trimmed staircase to the restaurant’s second-floor dining room, where they settled into custom-made oxblood leather chairs.
It’s a sophisticated, chic room, illuminated at night to a golden glow. At the center, giant, feathery, vaguely Seussian pink floral arrangements strike a whimsical note. Designed by Norman Foster, the décor was inspired by the Deco style of a 1930s ocean liner; you can imagine Barbara Stanwyck in a sparkly evening gown floating across the thick, silvery carpet.
The desserts keep that buoyant glamour going. Swags of meringue top a Mont Blanc dacquoise with cassis and chestnut mousse; billowing banana Chantilly covers crème caramels; a profoundly bittersweet chocolate almond moelleux is scented with smoky black cardamom. Like the rest of the menu, Sydney Hursa’s desserts are intelligently conceived and designed to surprise — without losing any of their fun.
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