The fact that it stood slightly to the left of Carnegie Hall, as the ads said, didn't make the Russian Tea Room leftist. If anything, it was rightist, as in Tsarist, and it never felt righter than when you were in the festive green salon in a front booth of crimson leather with flights of infused vodkas and blini with hot butter, caviar and sour cream. For three quarters of a turbulent century, the famished and famischt have been making their way to its familiar re
d awning at 150 West Fifty-seventh Street, where the spectacle went well beyond the food and drink.
If there's a more storied boîte than the Russian Tea Room still in New York, I don't know it. The Stork Club and Algonquin Round Table were probably the closest thing, and they are long gone. Sure, there are still "21" and Sardi's and Elaine's, not to mention the Fraunces Tavern, but where else would you have found Madonna checking coats, Bernstein composing the opening bars of Fancy Free, a quintet of Raquel Welch, Sylvester Stallone, Robert Mitchum, Michael Douglas and Birgit Nilsson mourning the death of Yul Brynner, the Shah of Iran's sister slipping out a back way to avoid an angry mob, or Zero Mostel donning an apron to take orders for "peasant under glass" and begging passersby to come in and spend money because the owner was going broke?
If you knew the Russian Tea Room back when, it may take some squinting to recall it through the dazzle of its recent $30-million reincarnation by the late Warner LeRoy, who did with restaurants such as Central Park's Tavern on the Green what his father, Mervyn LeRoy, and grandfather, Harry Warner, did with Hollywood epics. Now the torch has been passed to his daughter Jennifer. But under the new Russian Tea Room's 700,000-piece Tiffany ceiling, transplanted from LeRoy's fabled Maxwell's Plum, and behind the $500,000 tree hung with Murano-glass Fabergé eggs and fifteen-foot acrylic bear filled with swimming fish, the three-tiered Indian brass chandeliers and scale model of the Kremlin, complete with marching toy soldiers and changing day-night cycles, it remains the cherished Gotham landmark, albeit one now seating 1,500 -- five times the old capacity.
Faith Stewart-Gordon, the longtime owner who sold the place to LeRoy in 1995 and chronicled its heyday in a 1999 memoir, The Russian Tea Room: A Love Story (A Lisa Drew Book/Scribner), laughs off the hoopla, which, after all, is in step with the gaudier Fifty-seventh Street of Niketown et al. "I w
as prepared for it," she assured me a few months ago. "Warner had told me of these wild, Ringling Brothers effects."
Its beginnings were far more humble and partially lost to history. A chocolate shop and tea room -- tea then being the strongest legal libation -- was opened across Fifty-seventh Street around 1926, perhaps to cater to former dancers of the Imperial Russian Ballet who had fled the Bolsheviks. By 1929, Viennese choreographer Albertina Rasch's "Russian Tea Room" had moved across the street into an Italianate brownstone built, fittingly enough, by a tea and coffee merchant, John F. Pupke, in 1875. By 1933, when Prohibition ended, it was bought by a Siberian émigré, Alexander (Sasha) Maeef. At first he shared the space with a hosiery shop, but by the 1940s he had expanded dramatically, turning Pupke's old horse stable into an annex of exotic Russian and Arabic nightspots such as the Casino Russe, Boyar Room and Baghdad Room.
After the war, the Tea Room was sold to a group of investors, including a former high-school chemistry teacher named Sidney Kaye. In 1955, Kaye bought out his partners to become the sole owner. Around that time, he met a fetching blonde ingenue from Spartanburg, S.C.: Faith Burwell, a car-dealer's daughter who had toured in the musical revue New Faces of 1952. Sidney was eighteen years her senior, but they married in 1956, which is where the story essentially begins.
Under the magnetic Sidney and his beauteous if initially clueless bride, the Russian Tea Room attracted bevies of musicians -- it was just to the left of Carnegie Hall -- impresarios, dancers, writers, actors, agents and assorted hangers-on and star-gazers. Celebrity drew celebrity -- who knew how and when it began? Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner stopped in for resuscitation during rehearsals for Your Show of Shows. The ever-rumpled Sam Cohn settled in at a regular bar booth to make his colossal stage and film deals. George Balanchine strolled in with a ballerina on each arm. Sol Hurok came in weeping copious tears -- he had just come from the most touching movie of all time, The Sol Hurok Story. A young Russian defector, Rudolf Nureyev, found the fare comfortingly familiar, and he could dine there without fear of being poisoned by the KGB. Thornton Wilder came by. So did William Faulkner. Elizabeth Taylor's publicist, John Springer, chose the Russian Tea Room for her to show off her colossal new diamond ring from Richard Burton.
Sidney died in 1967, leaving Faith to carry on. Though feeling grievously unready, she was in fact well-tutored, and she shouldered the task, leading the Russian Tea Room to even greater renown. Names continued to flock in. Joan Rivers checked her Yorkshire terrier Spike in the checkroom (where Madonna worked briefly, until she was dismissed, if you can imagine, for inappropriate attire). A diet-conscious Carol Channing brought her own victuals in a silver lunchbox. Lovebirds such as David and Helen Gurley Brown, Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin had rendezvous there several times a week for lunch. Warren and Susie Buffett doped out the financial markets over chicken Kiev and cherry Cokes, and, of course, Dustin Hoffman donned women's clothes to fool Sidney Pollack as his agent in Tootsie, one of the many films shot in part in the Russian Tea Room.
At its pinnacle in the 1980s, before the stock-market crash of 1987, the Russian Tea Room was serving 2,684 pounds of caviar a year, well over a ton. Also: four tons of beets, nearly eight tons of sour cream, more than twenty tons of lamb, and nearly 6,000 liters of vodka. Clementine Paddleford, food editor of the Daily News, once asked chef Gary Siderenko for his borscht recipe. No problem, he said: take 20 lbs. of bones, 12 lbs. of beets....
No, no, no, interrupted the alarmed Paddleford, this was only for six people. Siderenko threw up his hands. "Can't make borscht for six people," he said.
If the cuisine, though not quite an afterthought, was never the raison d'être of the Russian Tea Room, Warner LeRoy resolved to refashion the kitchen as well as the upper floors, or he wasn't the son of the maker of The Wizard of Oz. Along with the nostalgia, today's diners feast on appetizers of foie gras with pickled fruit and sauternes jelly; pelmeni, or Siberian veal and beef dumplings in chicken broth; and Russian deviled eggs with caviar. These are followed by entrées of venison Rossini and skewered lamb chops with Georgian spices, as well as such staples as chicken Kiev and beef Stroganoff. For me, besides sitting in the next-to-Sam Cohn booth, with a good view of Judy Collins and her dinner party, the highlight was the vodka "flight," three flutes: one pear and vanilla bean, one horseradish and new potato, and one aptly called four alarm and five pepper. Now I know why they call them flights.
RALPHH BLUMENTHAL is an arts reporter for The New York Times and the author of Stork Club: America's Most Famous Nightspot and the Lost World of Café Society (Little, Brown and Company, 2000).
photos: courtesy Faith Stewart-Gordon
OPERA NEWS, July 2002 Copyright © 2002 The Metropolitan Opera Guild, Inc.
An RTR background for Dudley Moore, Armand Assante and Natassja Kinski in the 1983 film
Unfaithfully Yours, above;the restaurant's famous green and crimson salon, left
Diva Blanche Thebom, playwright Paddy Chayevsky, Sol Hurok and actress Patricia Morrison in the 1950s, above;
Ballet Russe legends Frederick Franklin --and Alexandra Danilova reunited at
the Russian Tea Room in the 1970s, below
