Famed Four Seasons Restaurant Gets New Chef

New York's famed Four Seasons restaurant, which invented the "power lunch,'' has a new executive chef.
    
The 50-year-old Manhattan establishment announced Thursday that it hired Fabio Trabocchi, an Italian who is already a star of international kitchens.
    
Trabocchi, 35, was most recently the executive chef at New York's Fiamma. Before that he worked in Washington, D.C., at Maestro, a Washington Post four-star restaurant. He won a James Beard Foundation Best Chef Mid Atlantic award in 2006, shortly after arriving in the United States.
    
"Since I was a young chef, I have always admired this legendary restaurant from afar,'' Trabocchi said in a statement. "Today it is a great honor to be a part of it.''
    
He will start stirring the pots at The Four Seasons next week. But it won't be until later in the fall that his new menus will make their debut.
    
The restaurant lost its longtime chef, Christian Albin, to cancer last June.
    
The Four Seasons was the first luxury restaurant to celebrate American cuisine, winning its place on the high-end food map by using locally grown ingredients in seasonally changing menus.
    
Known for its architecture at the base of the Seagram building designed by Mies van der Rohe, the landmark restaurant itself was created by Philip Johnson.
    
Trabocchi, who has also worked in Milan, Moscow and Marbella, Spain, "offers the perfect ingredients we need to serve our guests,'' said Four Seasons co-owner Alex von Bidder.
    
Another famous New York chef, the French-born Daniel Boulud, said that while Trabocchi "is grounded in a rich European tradition, his imagination and creativity make him one of the best rising chefs in America today.''