Field Guide: Russian Tea Room
You probably can't afford it, but the re-opening of the Russian Tea Room earlier this month caused the predictable swooning among the city's gilded set. You know, the set that enjoys eating in dining rooms with oil paintings on the walls and red—lots of red—everywhere. The set that'll pay an astronomical amount for borscht. Borscht! Oh, if Stalin could only see it now ...
But we come here today not to discuss the relative merits, or not, of expensive peasant food. No, we have more noble ideals in mind. To wit: to understand the fabled, tangled history of one of the city's most recognizable restaurants. Along the way, there'll be outsized egos squashed like so many beets, messy legal troubles, and family drama worthy of the Karamazovs. Come, let us take you inside the Russian Tea Room, so that you may finally understand what all the freaking fuss is about.
First, the backstory: It all started in 1926, when some Russki ballet dancers decided they needed a place to kick back and do vodka shots. Just kidding—it was actually opened as a chocolate shop and tea room. (Prohibition—what a bitch!) The spot soon became the place to see and be seen for the art fags of the 1920s and '30s, and was eventually bought by a probably shady Siberian named Alexander Maeef. He sold it in 1955 to a man named Sidney Kaye, and thus the golden era of the RTR began, largely thanks to his wife, the social-climbing Faith Stewart-Gordon, who took over the restaurant when Kaye died in 1967. Everyone who was anyone hung out at the Russian Tea Room. Leonard Bernstein! Woody Allen! Henry Kissinger! Mikhail Baryshnikov! Madonna, coat-check girl! They filmed parts of Tootsie there, for Chrissakes. Remember that scene when Dustin Hoffman gets all up in Sidney Pollack's face? The RTR was one of those super-fancy restaurants where the dirty little secret is that the food is kind of eh. Even the famous chicken Kiev. Kind of eh! But who cared? The rich and famous had their playroom.
When Stewart-Gordon sold the joint to Warner LeRoy, things started disintegrating—though it wasn't clear what was happening at first. LeRoy closed the restaurant in 1996, and brought on a partner who was supposed to usher in a new era in Russian Tea Room fabulousness: David Bouley. The plan was to totally gut the Tea Room, with Bouley becoming executive chef and designing a new menu. LeRoy was then supposed to "Bouley International," which was to include a new restaurant and culinary center in Tribeca. Well, you can probably guess how that partnership worked out. In 1998, LeRoy sued Bouley, claiming that the chef was diverting funds from their partnership. Before the suit was resolved, LeRoy allegedly threw Bouley's equipment into the street, and Bouley was spotted carting his stuff around in a van for days. Poor baby.
But the Werner LeRoy era never really worked. He sank a ton of money into the project—$36 million on the interior alone. For his money, he got some freakish items, including a 15-foot acrylic bear filled with parrot fish that's still there. LeRoy died in 2001, and the restaurant was sold to the U.S. Golf Association, which tried to turn it into a golf museum. That didn't work out, and the property was sold to developer Gerald Lieblich for $19 million. He's installed a new chef, Gary Robins, who's still cranking out the old standbys like borscht and blinis, but has supposedly updated the menu. Since we haven't been invited, we couldn't really say. But if you'd like to weigh in, by all means do so.
