Holocaust escapee gained prominence as force behind NYC restaurant
Friends and loved ones are mourning the recent passing of longtime Santa Fe resident Tom Margittai, who was renowned in the restaurant world for his role in building Manhattan’s Four Seasons restaurant into a power lunch site for New Yorkers.
He died Nov. 23 at the age of 90 at Christus St. Vincent Regional Medical Center from complications of heart surgery.
Margittai (pronounced mar-gihTIE) escaped the Holocaust as a boy before making his way with his family to Canada and then the United States. He began his restaurant career as a dishwasher at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York City.
“His background — where he came from, how he worked his way up from being a dishwasher to becoming a pre-eminent and nationally known leader in the restaurant business — was amazing,” said retired attorney Lewis Pollock of Santa Fe, who befriended Margittai in 1992.
“He didn’t huff and puff and brag about it,” Pollock said. “But everybody knew that when he talked about food and the presentation of food in a public place, he knew what he was talking about.”
A New York Times obituary said Margittai was born in April 1928 in Sighet, Transylvania, where his father owned a lumber mill. By the end of the 1930s, his family had moved to Budapest, which for some time remained a relatively safe haven for Jews during the Nazi invasions in Europe.
But that changed in 1944 when Germans began marking Jews in Budapest for death. In a 2010 interview with the Santa Fe New Mexican, Margittai said that while serving as a gofer for the Jewish Council headquarters in Budapest, he heard that Jewish attorney and former journalist Rezsö Kasztner was working with Nazi officials to save some 1,700 Budapest Jews by sending them on a “safe” train to Switzerland.
The Germans, who by that time in World War II were clearly losing, needed trucks and other goods, and they arranged a trade in which certain Jewish citizens could pay for the right to ride the train.
Though the Germans initially diverted the “Kasztner Train,” as it was known, to a concentration camp, eventually most of the passengers, including Margittai and family, reached Switzerland safely. Margittai would later refer to Kasztner — who was assassinated by right-wing extremists in Tel Aviv in 1957 — as his hero, telling The New Mexican that the incident “was the most important episode of my life.”
Margittai arrived in New York City on a tourist visa in 1950. Of his seemingly meteoric rise in the restaurant business, he simply told an interviewer, “I went to train at the Waldorf Astoria hotel, and then I became a U.S. resident, and from then on I worked in the hotel industry.”
In the early 1970s, Margittai and a partner, Paul Kovi, bought the Four Seasons restaurant, which was then in decline. By decade’s end, the two men had modernized the menu, hired top-flight chefs and, according to the New York Times, “introduced healthful ‘spa cuisine,’ and other culinary innovations, like a baked potato served with its own bottle of Lungarotti olive oil.”
In the early 1980s, Margittai briefly courted controversy after telling the Times, which was writing a story about the problem restaurant cloakrooms had dealing with bulky down coats, that the Four Seasons never had that challenge because down coats were usually worn by secretaries. Outraged readers wrote angry letters giving Margittai grief for the comment, which led him to apologize and say that he, too, sometimes wore down coats.
Kovi and Margittai retired in 1994, several years after Margittai had moved to Santa Fe. For the most part, Margittai lived a lowkey existence in Santa Fe, though he was a continual supporter of the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, the Santa Fe Opera and the Lensic Performing Arts Center, according to friends.
His spouse, Richard Tang, is a Santa Fe-based jeweler.
Santa Fean Nancy Zeckendorf, a former New Yorker and longtime friend of Margittai’s, said the two would often reminisce about his time in New York, but that once he retired in Santa Fe, he rarely went back east.
Several years ago, however, the two of them attended a function at the Four Seasons. “It was wonderful to see how all the people there received Tom,” she said. “They treated him like the king had come back home.”
She said Margittai was the only person she knew who could make a specific Hungarian sauerkraut soup, which he would often cook for her.
“I’m gonna miss that,” she said. “And I’m gonna miss seeing him at the opera simulcasts at the Lensic. He was part of a circle of friends who adored him, a family, and we just lost a very special member of our family.”