Four Seasons S.F. serves up new uniforms

A student design. Photo: Liz Hafalia, The Chronicle

As the Four Seasons’ director of marketing walked out of the half-finished dining room, she patted the brocade silk walls in the hallway that would soon be torn out.

“See this? This is Nob Hill. This is Pacific Heights. That …” Kelly Nelson gestured to the new dining room, a light wood retro-newsroom-inspired space with a bar twice the size it used to be. “That’s SoMa.”

With a new dining room and uniforms set to debut June 3, the Four Seasons – that stalwart Market Street hotel whose private residences house some of the city’s wealthiest – has started leaning toward the city’s south.

The Seasons restaurant will now be MKT, with old-timey touches, a secret speakeasy room (three knocks to enter), and a large communal table by the bar. They’ll host brunch fashion shows and “battle of the bloggers” bar nights. And the uniforms – once relatively shapeless – are now tightly tailored and modern.

Designing those uniforms was, they said, the most important part of the transition.

“Our residents are very much the doyens of San Francisco, of the Opera and the Ballet, and they have pride in San Francisco, in how it’s changing. And they like being relevant,” said Seema Parthasarathy, the hotel’s assistant director of food and beverage. “The old space was opulent, stately, formal and the uniforms … Well, right now the staff has been wearing this androgynous skirt. It’s terrible, actually.”

“Awful,” said Nelson.

“They have no pleating,” Parthasarathy continued. “It’s just a bowl and then long sleeves.”

Neither of them knew where the uniforms, which the staff has worn since 2001, were from or who had designed them.

“We knew we needed new uniforms.”

They had agreed to work with the TV fashion competition show “Project Runway,” but they didn’t want to wait on its seasonal schedule. So they called up the Academy of Artand decided to put on a fierce, yearlong competition among the students. The winners would dress the iconic hotel’s dining staff.

“For the first meeting, we did a presentation to the students and said we didn’t want a uniform, we wanted something chic that they could wear out,” said Nelson. “And then we just let them go.”

One afternoon, during a judging session in February, midway through the competition, Parthasarathy, Nelson and hotel manager Loga Nathan looked at muslin mockups of the uniforms on mannequins.

Nathan tugged at the skirt. “Maybe shorter?”

“They can’t go shorter,” Parthasarathy said firmly.

Nelson pointed to a sketch of a colorful, flowing uniform-“Something like this would look great on Tanya, yeah?”

Parthasarathy glanced over – “Great for a resort – not for us, not for a city hotel. She’d freeze to death.”

Students like Casimiro Llamas, a 25-year-old master’s of fine arts fashion student living in Oakland, watched nervously.

Over six visits, the Four Seasons team whittled down the original 25 competitors. They were surprised by what they liked – one student did a “brilliant” all-denim design that they loved, but he was hired by H&M the next week and didn’t return to class.

“Eventually, we had to think functionally,” Parthasarathy said. “It wasn’t all going to be a cocktail party. We had to be serious.”

“It was totally ‘Project Runway,’ ” said Nelson. “It was hard for us to be critical, but we had to be.”

The sleeves had to be loose enough to reach across the table but tight enough not to sag into someone’s plate.

Color was a challenge – it had to be dark enough to mask spills and “had to be a color that transcended breakfast, lunch and dinner,” Parthasarathy said.

Among the three winners was ShanShan Bai, a 27-year-old MFA student living in Nob Hill who won for her server, bartender and buser pants. The others were Linglu Jiang and Qian Bao. The samples were sent to a manufacturer in Italy selected for its expertise in small-batch production and custom cuttings.

“My first inspiration is actually metal interior design and installation art,” said Bai, who is from Xinjiang, China. “The garments have a lot of sharp lines. I thought to keep them minimal.

“A normal project, we just design what we like, what we imagine in our heads,” she said. “This was different. The winning uniform is actually in production, so we have to think about the function of the design. They have to work in them.”

The restaurant and bar itself, designed by avant-garde New York design firm AvroKo, has antique ink bottles lining the walls and iron rods separating sections. The name MKT pays homage to farmers’ markets and Market Street, which the restaurant looks onto. One of the two new private dining rooms is PD3, “a private dining den” with a pass code (three knocks).

Where there were once oversize armchairs (ideal for reading a newspaper over Scotch), there are now lighter chairs that can be easily moved into clusters. Cocktail menus come on clipboards with vintage brass tacks.

Matching the uniform and decor will be a set of new, crowd-pleasing events. For a monthly “fashion brunches” series, the Four Seasons will invite retailers from the neighborhood (Azadeh, Jimmy Choo, Vera Wang, Vince) to stage small shows in the dining room. Tickets will be around $80 each. Last year’s Tory Burch trial brunch sold out its 100 seats within two hours of the announcement.

“We’ll keep it casual, let models walk through and talk to the ladies, let it be interactive,” Nelson said.

They’ll also put on a monthly Battle of the Blogs night – two bloggers will design a cocktail and compete in bar games (for example, catch an olive in your mouth). The audience will vote by throwing poker chips into fishbowls.

A smorgasbord of South of Market dining trends, the redesign and new uniforms show the Four Seasons might be changing. General Manager Doug Housley has taken the place of famously strict and old-school Stan Bromley. Nelson and Parthasarathy run into each other at Chez Maman on Potrero Hill, near where they both live.

“Now we’re 1920s meets 2013. A little trendy, but a little timeless,” Nelson said. “We expect it to be current another five years.”