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"\u201CI cannot change the way I am,\u201D Julian Niccolini said as he nervously twisted a package of sweetener into a little ball. \u201CI&amp;#39;m a people person. I love people. I&amp;#39;m never gonna change that, even when somebody tells me I&amp;#39;m a terrible human being.\u201D\n\nWe were seated in the Pool Room of Julian&amp;#39;s legendary Midtown Manhattan restaurant, The Four Seasons, at table 89, a perch from which, at lunchtime, one could take in the entire lustrous panorama of power diners reposed around a shimmering pool of water. A few feet away from us, at a lesser table, Niccolini had himself once sat as a customer.\n\nIt was 1977 and he was 24 at the time, an Italian \u00E9migr\u00E9 working as a waiter in a pricey French restaurant. His co-workers were always belittling the Four Seasons\u2014too big, too impersonal\u2014but he saw potential in its grandeur, in its prime location at the corner of 52nd and Park Avenue, and in its emphasis on seasonal ingredients. That summer night, Julian decided he would like to work at The Four Seasons.\n\nAnd so the owners hired him to oversee the Grill Room, the cavernous walnut-paneled space down the hall from the Pool Room. Before long, he had helped transform The Four Seasons into the most consequential lunch spot in America\u2014the culinary destination for visiting celebrities, the deal-cutting venue for CEOs. Thirty-eight years later, Julian Niccolini still lorded over the Grill Room and its billionaire habitu\u00E9s like their preening viceroy.\n\nSoon all of this will change forever. A year from now, the restaurant will be gone, forced from the Seagram Building\u2014the only home it&amp;#39;s known since its creation in 1959\u2014so that the building&amp;#39;s owner, Aby Rosen, can install a restaurant of his own. A year from now, Julian might be a convicted criminal, perhaps done in by his inability to change while the rest of the world changes around him. For this past May, the 62-year-old co-owner is alleged to have assaulted a woman at the bar of the Grill Room\u2014fondling her before she managed to break free and later bring a felony charge against him. To many who have observed his antics over the decades, the episode seemed not only plausible but also metaphoric, further evidence that both The Four Seasons and its frontman belonged to an earlier, brazenly chauvinistic era.\n\nJulian sees the future quite differently. He intends to be cleared of the criminal charge against him. He also intends to disprove the insinuation that his shelf life as a restaurateur has expired. Julian and his longtime business partner, Alex von Bidder, plan to show that The Four Seasons can flourish elsewhere, even when stripped of its historical grandiosity and thrown into the shark tank of edgier restaurants run by culinary artistes half Julian&amp;#39;s age. \u201CPeople today want to have fun at restaurants,\u201D Julian told me. He could adapt, he figured. Fun was his thing. Fun had always been his thing. Maybe people misunderstood this about him\u2014that even his missteps were made in good fun. But he could not change who he was.\n\n\n\nBefore everything changes, you would do well to spend a couple of hours and approximately half your life savings at The Four Seasons. The Grill Room, designed by the famed architects Philip Johnson and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, feels like a hypermasculine cousin of the Library of Congress, all wood and bronze and soundtracked by the low hum of commerce and the gentle swishing of the chain curtains.\n\nFacebookPinterest\u2022 Julian Niccolini\u2019s bawdy affection for female clients was, for years, shrugged off as an \u201CItalianism.\u201D  NEIL RASMUS/BFA NYC \n\nEnter and you encounter a white-haired, aquiline-nosed man. This is Julian Niccolini. Since you&amp;#39;re new here, he will glance down at the seating chart and then say to one of the young ladies beside him, \u201CTable 50\u201D\u2014which is one of the eleven tables in Siberia, also known as the terrace, a world away from the titans seated around the twenty-odd tables on the Grill Room&amp;#39;s ground floor. Alternatively, you can book a table for dinner down the hall in the Pool Room, superintended by Alex von Bidder, the steady and discreet superego to Julian&amp;#39;s wisecracking id. Here, around the glittering pool, the transaction is of a different sort; as super-chef David Chang recalled of his first visit, \u201CIt looked like the perfect place to close the deal with a date, surrounded by all those silver foxes and beautiful things.\u201D\n\nWhichever room you choose, you&amp;#39;ll notice two things. First is that the food is exorbitant (over $70 for some entr\u00E9es) and often lackluster. A wild snapper with corn and guajillo sauce I had at lunch seemed a tired throwback to the nouveau-southwestern craze a couple of decades back. The ahi tuna burger from the bar menu was resoundingly inedible. Such trifles, as even restaurant critics who have consistently praised The Four Seasons acknowledge, are ultimately beside the point. You come here to bask in the spaciousness of what Jackie Onassis liked to call \u201Cthe cathedral.\u201D You come to take your rightful place in the pantheon and to be seen occupying that choice real estate. About a thousand faithful Four Seasons customers have a \u201Chouse account\u201D\u2014meaning the bill typically goes directly to their companies. My old boss, former GQ editor-in-chief Art Cooper, had one such arrangement with The Four Seasons. According to Julian, Art spent about $200,000 a year at his favorite restaurant and never once saw a receipt\u2014all the way up until June of 2003, when he rose from his corner booth, lumbered over to a barstool, succumbed to a stroke, and died at the age of 65.\n\nThat&amp;#39;s the second thing you&amp;#39;ll notice about The Four Seasons: Its clientele is, eh, not youthful. Still, it&amp;#39;s possible to look down from Siberia upon the octo- and nona-genarians and to imagine them as younger, hungrier, Bonfire of the Vanities versions of their present-day selves.\n\nJulian Niccolini was present at their ascension, and they at his. On the subway to work each morning, he studied the Times, the Daily News, and Women&amp;#39;s Wear Daily to find out which celebrities were in town, what schemes the ultra-wealthy were up to, and who was cavorting with whom. The Grill Room&amp;#39;s seating chart became Julian&amp;#39;s interpretation of America&amp;#39;s pecking order. Even the richest of patrons would come to learn that this was Julian&amp;#39;s roost. As longtime customer Bill White, the CEO of the development firm Constellations Group, puts it, \u201CThe Four Seasons is one place where the customer isn&amp;#39;t always right.\u201D\n\nJulian&amp;#39;s reputation as a host persisted to the point that he was eventually penning columns in Gotham, Details, and the New York Observer, where he&amp;#39;d flatter this or that \u201Cbeautiful\u201D customer while gossiping about others (Bethenny Frankel urinating in a wine bucket). He also dispensed wisdom that ranged from the practical (like when to wear a linen suit) to the prurient (like what to do when a woman hits on you when your wife is standing nearby). At least a few uninitiated readers must have wondered just who this pretentious reptile was.\n\nFacebookPinterest\uFFFC\uFFFC\uFFFC\uFFFC\u2022 For its grandeur, Jackie Onassis called The Four Seasons \u201Cthe cathedral.\u201D For the clientele it hosted, the restaurant inspired the term \u201Cpower lunch.\u201D \u00A9 The New York Times\n\nBack at the restaurant, of course, the old warhorses roared with appreciation when Julian presided over a lascivious Valentine&amp;#39;s Day menu that included Hanky Panky Veal Shanky and Peek-a-Boo Polenta; or when he distributed wiener appetizers the day Anthony Weiner went down in scandal; or when he reportedly arranged for a woman to approach Vernon Jordan&amp;#39;s table and expose her titanic breasts to him for a solid thirty seconds.\n\nThe restaurant critic John Mariani wrote in his 1994 book about The Four Seasons that Julian&amp;#39;s \u201Ceccentricities were shrugged off as mere Italianisms.\u201D And Julian\u2014who has been married for the past thirty-three years and has two adult daughters\u2014played his charm for laughs. For instance, in an advice column in 2006, he wrote that while only an idiot would have sex with a co-worker, \u201Csleeping with a client, or customer, of course, is different.\u201D\n\nTen years later, the joke was stale, dangerously so.\n\n\n\nMaybe the incident that ended in Julian&amp;#39;s arrest had begun, that night in May, in fun. However things started, it certainly seems the young woman saw something dark in the restaurateur&amp;#39;s alleged overtures. It&amp;#39;s equally clear that Julian Niccolini&amp;#39;s bawdy act wasn&amp;#39;t playing as well these days as it had in the past.\n\nThree months before the alleged assault, The Four Seasons hosted a high-ticket fund-raiser attended by several of the city&amp;#39;s celebrated new chefs and sommeliers. They were uniformly younger than Julian, raised in a different era. They did not flirt with the customers. Did not stare at cleavage. Did not whisper to a male client that the female a few tables away appeared not to be wearing any underwear. They were aware of Julian Niccolini&amp;#39;s reputation as a horndog. But they respected what he had accomplished and were inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt.\n\nStill, that night several of them were appalled as Julian held forth, \u201Csaying the most unbelievable shit,\u201D recalls one attendee. \u201CThe stuff that came out of his mouth\u2014three or four references to having sex. \u2018It&amp;#39;s like fucking a woman\u2019\u2014that kind of thing. In front of like 300 people. Obviously he&amp;#39;s got a bunch of 60-to-80-year-old guys who think it&amp;#39;s okay to objectify women. But it struck a lot of us as completely out of line. Personally, I wouldn&amp;#39;t let him within a hundred feet of my wife.\u201D\n\nThat generational divide may have been at play on the evening of May 9, when The Four Seasons hosted a F\u00EAte de la Fleur champagne reception followed by a six-course meal with twenty-one tastings of wine. It was reportedly about nine o&amp;#39;clock, and Julian and the young woman\u2014whose father is said to be a former business associate of his\u2014were at the bar. According to the police complaint she later filed, Julian kissed her while pulling her body toward his. When the young woman resisted, the report says, Julian reached into the back of her dress, tore her bra, and then groped her, resulting in scratch marks on her back and a bruise on her hip while he attempted to pull down her stockings. \u201CI am further informed,\u201D wrote the detective in the report, \u201Cthat informant repeatedly told defendant to stop and that she was trying to break free of defendant&amp;#39;s hold while he was doing this but that she was unable to.\u201D\n\nAt a recent Four Seasons soiree, Julian held forth, \u201Csaying the most\nunbelievable shit,\u201D one attendee told me. \u201CPersonally, I wouldn&amp;#39;t\nlet him within a hundred feet of my wife.\u201D\n\nTwo days later, she paid a visit to the NYPD Midtown North station. According to the New York Post, the police arranged for her to call Julian while they taped the conversation. In the Post&amp;#39;s account, the Four Seasons co-owner (who, through his attorney, has denied all of the allegations while refusing further comment; the young woman has also fended off media inquiries) apologized to his accuser on the phone while pleading, \u201CLet&amp;#39;s not go any further with this.\u201D\n\nThe Special Victims Division charged Julian with first-degree sexual abuse, punishable by up to seven years&amp;#39; imprisonment. He surrendered to the authorities early on the morning of June 3. Julian was freed without bail and before long was back at The Four Seasons and presiding over lunch.\n\nFacebookPinterest\u2022 Regulars at the power haunt: clockwise from top left, Brendan Gill and Jackie Onassis; Truman Capote and Lee Radziwill; Richard Gere; Andy Warhol; Warren Buffett; Alana and Rod Stewart. \n\n\u201CPersonally, yes, it&amp;#39;s hurt me,\u201D Julian told me of the suggestion that some would view him as a sexual predator. \u201CIt&amp;#39;s very hurtful.\u201D Friends took to the web to voice their support for Julian. Mauro Maccioni\u2014the son of Sirio Maccioni, owner of one of Manhattan&amp;#39;s other famed power spots, Le Cirque\u2014wrote on Facebook that his friend was \u201Ca great Tuscan gentleman.\u201D The radio entrepreneur Bill O&amp;#39;Shaughnessy\u2014a Four Seasons sultan who loved to engage in off-color ribaldry with Julian\u2014added, \u201CThe book on you is that you&amp;#39;re a big flirt\u2026but totally harmless.\u201D\n\n\u201CThe guy is a flirt. He&amp;#39;s Italian. They like the ladies,\u201D Bill White told me. \u201COkay, maybe he had some drinks. But I&amp;#39;m sure it was meant in fun.\u201D\n\nLess easy to square with their belief that the incident was overblown was the fact that he had faced a somewhat similar accusation in 1991, from an employee who alleged that Julian sexually harassed her throughout her five-year tenure. (That case was settled confidentially, and I was unable to reach her.) I asked a number of longtime female patrons of the restaurant what they made of the charges against Julian. \u201CI did tend to think he was a little too familiar, and maybe having a little too much fun,\u201D said famed dining critic Gael Greene. \u201CBut it didn&amp;#39;t bother me. I&amp;#39;m sorry to say that Julian never tried to seduce me. Probably I should be embarrassed to admit that. Perhaps he thought it best not to attack restaurant critics.\u201D\n\nThe queen of New York gossip columnists, 92-year-old Liz Smith, has patronized The Four Seasons since it opened, often with the financier Pete Peterson. \u201CPete found him amusing in the way that teenaged boys find dirty jokes amusing,\u201D she told me. \u201CI&amp;#39;ve always seen him as one of those guys who wanted to appear that they were having a lot more sex than they actually were. Of course, I&amp;#39;m hopelessly out of date. And I hate to say this, but sometimes I think the world has totally lost its sense of humor. I think women are generally used to men making passes. It would have to be pretty bad for me to go to the police.\u201D\n\nTo others, it&amp;#39;s a matter of dignity in an industry that&amp;#39;s only recently begun to view women as more than objects of lust. \u201CI don&amp;#39;t know enough about what happened at The Four Seasons,\u201D Amanda Cohen, the 40-year-old chef/owner of the acclaimed East Village restaurant Dirt Candy, wrote me in an e-mail. \u201CBut I&amp;#39;ve been around long enough to see this business change from owners and investors who treated restaurants like their own personal playgrounds to what you have today\u2014which is owners, investors, and chefs who treat it like an office where sexual behavior isn&amp;#39;t tolerated.\u201D\n\n\u201CJulian never tried to seduce me. Probably I should be embarrassed\nto admit that. Perhaps he thought it best not to attack restaurant\ncritics,\u201D Gael Greene told me.\n\nChange happens, and the great institutions are often at pains to adapt. In June, it was reported that a young man entered the Yale Club wearing a T-shirt that read FUCK FOREVER, prompting fulminations from the Old Guard that civilization had reached its nadir. Food &amp;amp; Wine announced its Best Restaurants of the Year, and the sole New York winner was Cosme, a noisy year-old Mexican joint housed in a former strip club.\n\nI tried to get a table at Cosme, but it was impossible. I also tried to get into Ralph Lauren&amp;#39;s Polo Bar, which attracts celebrities the way The Four Seasons used to\u2014and where Julian recently dined and was later heard to scoff, \u201CWho&amp;#39;s gonna eat at a restaurant in a basement? It won&amp;#39;t last.\u201D By contrast, when I sought a lunch reservation at The Four Seasons&amp;#39; Grill Room the following day, OpenTable informed me that there were tables at any time I wished (not mentioning, of course, that I would be seated in Siberia while seats on the main floor awaited its faithful titans).\n\n\u201CAnd don&amp;#39;t change a goddamn thing!\u201D Bill O&amp;#39;Shaughnessy had thundered while toasting The Four Seasons during its fiftieth-anniversary bash. In yanking its lease, Aby Rosen has left the restaurant no choice. But Alex and Julian have decided to make a virtue out of the changes thrust upon them. Julian told me that they&amp;#39;ll likely move downtown, and their new establishment will still be called The Four Seasons, but that it will not be The Four Seasons of old. It might be nice, Julian allowed, to move beyond the ceaseless jockeying for the optimal power table\u2014all that \u201Ccompetition for attention,\u201D as he put it, \u201Ctaking all these calls, nonstop.\u201D It might also be nice to have a more manageable space, not having to serve 300 meals all at once.\n\n\u201CThe future is a much more relaxed atmosphere,\u201D he said. \u201CPeople want to go out, have fun, and drink a lot. The food is basically secondary. Of course, The Four Seasons will still have tremendous architecture, incredible service, and great food. But it will be more casual. Because that&amp;#39;s what people want today.\u201D\n\nThe enthusiasm in his voice was, at best, marginal. Then again, it had been a long twenty-four hours. The previous day, he and others said good-bye to an old Four Seasons mainstay, JPMorgan&amp;#39;s star dealmaker Jimmy Lee, who had died the previous week while exercising at home. Lee was 62, Julian&amp;#39;s age. The place was packed all afternoon and evening with a who&amp;#39;s who of the finance elite, and no one was leaving; everyone was grieving and transacting at the restaurant. A sad day, a very good day\u2014this was how it worked, always, seasons changing yet somehow still the same.\n\nRobert Draper  is a GQ correspondent."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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