America’s Most Powerful Lunch, by Lee Eisenberg

For two decades, the Four Seasons was the epicenter of culture in America. Jackie Onassis, Henry Kissinger, and Nora Ephron were just some of the regulars at the New York City restaurant, but the real stars were the creative power brokers in publishing, fashion, architecture, and advertising who convened in the massive, elegant bar room to make the decisions about what books we read, wine we drank, and clothes we wore. In his 1979 feature on the Four Seasons, former Esquire editor in chief Lee Eisenberg coined the phrase “power lunch”—to the everlasting envy of food critics. One such critic, the acclaimed Alan Richman, joins podcast host David Brancaccio this week to discuss the closing of what Richman considers the greatest restaurant in American history, what made it unique, and why it belonged to a vanishing world.