Where CEOS Cosplayed As Emperors
LIKE ANY TALENTED theatrical restaurateur, Joe Baum had his share of hits: Windows on the World, Tavern on the Green, Fonda del Sol. He also had his share of flops, none more titanic or comically misconceived than the extravagantly over-the-top Roman establishment that opened in the fall of 1957 on the ground floor of Rockefeller Center. Like the Four Seasons, which Baum debuted two years later, the Forum of the Twelve Caesars was built to cater to the high-rolling, high-spending captains of industry who populated midtown during its corporaterestaurant heyday. Unlike Philip Johnson’s sleekly modern, famously tasteful space in the Seagram Building, Forum featured faux-mosaic murals, Baroque-like portraits of Rome’s first dozen emperors, Champagne buckets designed to resemble upturned centurion helmets, and water taps in the restrooms that Mimi Sheraton merrily reported were shaped like bronze dolphins. Guests dined on bizarre creations such as “Oysters of Hercules” and “Fiddler Crab Lump à la Nero,” a dish that was served tableside and flaming, of course. Weirdly, the reviews weren’t horrible (Craig Claiborne praised the restaurant’s “lusty elegance”), though Michael Whiteman, a longtime restaurant consultant and Baum’s partner of 29 years, says it quickly became apparent that there weren’t enough corporate fat cats in midtown who “viewed themselves as Roman senators wandering around in togas, or whatever it was Roman senators used to wander around in,” to support it. When the managers of the Four Seasons offered to buy that restaurant in 1974, Baum’s former company, Restaurant Associates, made them take the Forum, too. They closed the place shortly after that, though for a long time, if you took a seat at the also-departed Rockefeller Center steakhouse AJ Maxwell’s, you could still see the faded murals—remnants of a vanished time.