The Return, Again, of the Power Lunch

Inset into the back wall of the dining room is a large pane of glass looking into the kitchen, whose non-stop action and stark, stainless-steel utility contrasts so dramatically with the womblike dining space that it feels almost like a living art installation. (Art is essential to a power restaurant; downstairs, the bartenders mix drinks beneath a twenty-four-foot-long ​​Larry Poons.) The kitchen is overseen by Jonathan Benno, a blue-chip chef who for a long time was the culinary No. 1 at Per Se, and who did his best work in the years following, at Lincoln Ristorante, in Lincoln Center, and at his namesake Benno, where he displayed a tremendous aptitude for Italian cooking, particularly pasta and seafood. (Benno is now closed.) It’s curious to see a chef of Benno’s accomplishments hitch his wagon to an institution like Jean-Georges, Vongerichten’s restaurant group, where the only marquee name tends to be Vongerichten’s own. The Jean-Georges empire is so far-reaching, and has endured for so long, that it’s able to indulge in a little self-mythologizing: the bar menu at Four Twenty Five is an album of the restaurant group’s greatest hits, including a tuna encrusted with rice crackers from his downtown Perry St., an ur-dish of the Asian-fusion two-thousands, and petite bites of buttered black bread topped with uni that are a signature of Vongerichten’s eponymous flagship restaurant, which for a variety of reasons—not least its location, in a Trump building off Columbus Circle—is no longer considered very chic.