Restaurant Associates, based in New York City, is among the country’s largest operator s of museum cafes . (It runs the cafeteria in The New York Times Building.) It also runs L’Avenue, the Parisian transplant in the Saks Fifth Avenue flagship store, where the pastry chef Pierre Hermé is designing the desserts, and it collaborated with Tiffany & Co. to create the chic Blue Box Café, which has a daily waiting list of about 2,000 names.

This lineup is making the company more than a management firm that simply prints the menus and sees to table settings.

It’s also a return to form. In its early decades , Restaurant Associates was known as a major innovative force in New York’s dining scene. The restaurateur Joe Baum created highly regarded theme restaurants for the company, like the original Four Seasons, La Fonda del Sol, Brasserie, the Forum of the Twelve Caesars and Tropica, all of which provided cachet to office buildings, a trend still followed by real estate developers. The company started and ran the Zum Zum wurst bars and revived Mamma Leone’s, a tourist magnet.

Mr. Baum was named head of the specialty restaurant division, and in 1963 became the company’s president; he tapped James Beard to be a consultant, especially for the American menu at the Four Seasons.

By the 1980s a number of its restaurants remained in business, and it was running catered events and the dining rooms in museums, cultural centers, offices and sporting arenas. For the public, however, its name had lost its luster.