How The Four Seasons Got Its Name

It was a book of haiku meditations on time and change that gave Joseph H. Baum the idea to name the new restaurant in the Seagram Building “The Four Seasons.” A visionary young hotelier who joined Riker’s Restaurant Associates (RA ) in 1952, Joe Baum was among those charged with creating what would become a shrine to haute cuisine. The poetry struck a chord, he recalls, because “everything we wanted to do with the restaurant represented change. What is more foodlike and sophisticated than the seasons and what they bring to New York? . . . The theatrical season; the social season, the fall, spring, summer . . . The happy idea of the seasons lets us create an enduring style instead of a contemporary fashion.”

RA asked personnel in all of their departments to offer ideas for names based on the seasons, reaping such contenders as “The Orbit of The Four Seasons,” “The Symphony of The Four Seasons,” “C’est la [sic] Saisons,“ and “Season-o-Rama” (the last two no doubt quickly discarded). The name eventually chosen was shorn of excess, in perfect keeping with the simplicity and elegance of the 24,000-square-foot space in architect Mies van der Rohe’s celebrated building.