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The Russian Tea Room!

The Russian Tea Room

The Russian Tea Room History

The Russian Tea Room was opened in 1927, by former members of the Russian Imperial Ballet, as a gathering place for Russian expatriates and became famous as a gathering place for those in the entertainment industry. The founder is often considered to be Polish-born Jacob Zysman, but in that year, a corporation directory gives Albertina Rasch as the president and her name appears along with Russian Art Chocolate and Russian Tea Room, in early photographs of the shopfront at 145 W. 57th St. In 1929, the business moved across the street to its present location, which at that time was an Italianate brownstone, built in 1875 by German immigrant John F. Pupke, a tea and coffee merchant, whose son later moved the large clan to Long Island, seeking a more relaxed lifestyle.

By 1933, the Siberian émigré Alexander Maeef was running the Russian Tea Room and was the main personality associated with the restaurant for the next fifteen years.

In 1955, the restaurant was purchased by Sidney Kaye, who, in 1967, left the restaurant to his widow, Faith Stewart-Gordon.

In 1981, Harry B. Macklowe, the developer of the Metropolitan Tower, planned a large office tower that would have included not only his own site at the Metropolitan Tower, but also the restaurant's and the lot on which Carnegie Hall Tower was erected. There was an agreement with Carnegie Hall about their lot, but Stewart-Gordon, who owned the lot dividing the project, refused to sell. Macklowe also offered to buy the air rights only and to give room for her restaurant inside the new tower building, but Stewart-Gordon declined. No matter what she was offered, Stewart-Gordon refused to sell the lot. During the planning of the Carnegie Hall Tower at 152 W. 57th St., on the other side of the Russian Tea Room, again Stewart-Gordon declined to sell its site or its air rights. The result is the narrow twenty-foot gap, separating the Metropolitan and Carnegie Hall towers.

In December 1996, Warner LeRoy, who owned Tavern on the Green, bought the restaurant from Stewart-Gordon for $6.5 million and closed it down, much to the despair of New York high society. After four years and $36 million in renovations, it reopened, but it was never the same; it closed with little notice on Sunday, July 28, 2002, after declaring bankruptcy. LeRoy's health was failing. Also, the local economy did not recover quickly enough to make payments on the substantial loans for the renovations.

After Warner LeRoy died, his estate sold the property for $16 million to the United States Golf Association in December 2002. The Association had planned to reconfigure the property as a dining room and museum, in which to showcase its extensive collection of golf memorabilia, but instead it sold the building in 2004 to the RTR Funding Group of Gerald Lieblich. The 20-foot-wide building goes all the way from 57th St. (the restaurant's main entrance) to 56th St. The plans are to replace some of the current building facing 56th St. with a 29-storey condominium, which is to be designed by Costas Kondylis. The original restaurant will be kept undisturbed.

The Russian Tea Room reopened on November 1, 2006. The restaurant's interior hasn't been touched and the over-the-top decor is the same as when it closed in 2002. However, several restaurant reviews have noted that the food and service leave significant room for improvement.

The Russian Tea Room Items of note

Its slogan is: "Six minutes and twenty-three seconds from Lincoln Center and slightly to the left of Carnegie Hall".

The British comedian, Rowan Atkinson, married Sunetra Sastry there, in 1990.

Scenes from Manhattan, The Turning Point, Tootsie and New York Stories, were filmed at the restaurant.

The Russian Tea Room is depicted in a painting by Beryl Cook.

In 1972, Madonna worked there, as a coat-check clerk.

Russian Tea Room Review

It’s a safe bet that many visitors to the reborn Russian Tea Room won’t realize that it still serves chicken Kiev and beef stroganoff, or at least interpretations thereof.

Russian Tea Room Opinions

These dishes aren’t mentioned in the clear print on the dinner menu’s first three pages, which cover appetizers and entrees and seem to exhaust the restaurant’s savory offerings. They aren’t mentioned on any kind of specials card.

No, they’re relegated to a typographical Siberia: an italicized blur on the mostly blank fourth page of the menu, where diners are also told of holidays on which the restaurant will be open.

“We are delighted to prepare historical Tea Room favorites, including chicken Kiev and beef stroganoff, on request,” reads the blur, which of course conveys the opposite message. If the Tea Room czars are so chirpily delighted, why not put the Kiev where people can find it?

That’s easy: because a torpedo of breaded chicken with a butter-filled cavity isn’t really what Gary Robins, a seriously gifted chef, wants to cook. Mr. Robins, whose new American cuisine at the Biltmore Room won him widespread praise, has a deservedly grander and less fry-happy sense of self.

His surprising recruitment to revive this wheezing institution has produced an engrossing tug-of-war: his culinary internationalism and contemporary sophistication versus the institution’s stodgy traditions and geographically constrained name; tataki of seared hamachi, which he sneaks onto the appetizer list, versus borscht, which he also dutifully includes there.

Some dishes seem not to have any firmer tether to Russia than the restaurant’s ersatz Chagall and Kandinsky paintings and golden firebirds have to conventional elegance. Other dishes blur the boundaries between Russia, Scandinavia, Eastern Europe and even the Far East.

By Mr. Robins’s reckoning, poaching Maine lobster in sour cream tugs it as close to Red Square as it needs to be, permitting him to round out the plate with pickled papaya and cauliflower flan. Putting dumplings made with tvorog, a Russian farmer’s cheese, next to slices of seared venison loin allows him to dust the meat with cocoa, a fate it doesn’t routinely meet in Moscow.

Make a concession, take a liberty — that’s how he handles his ethnic compass. It’s a smart approach, accommodating an impulse simply to do what feels right and yielding some very appealing dishes.

As best I can tell, goose breast carpaccio isn’t all the rage in St. Petersburg, but maybe it should be. Silky leaves of meat were sprinkled with toasted pistachio and crowned with baby arugula, tiny cubes of sour-cherry jelly and like-sized cubes of creamy foie gras.

If beef and noodles are all that’s necessary to claim a stroganoff, Mr. Robins satisfied the criteria while otherwise doing as he pleased. The beef was braised short rib, while the noodles were festooned with chanterelle and hen-of-the-woods mushrooms. For the rich, zingy sauce that completed this terrific dish, he mixed whipped cream, sour cream, horseradish and whole grain mustard.

Adding sour cream or cabbage is one of his recurring strategies, as is pickling an ingredient. Slices of pork tenderloin were complemented by a version of stuffed cabbage — steamed and filled with ground pork shoulder and foie gras — that was out of this world. And the pickled cabbage beside a beautifully roasted fillet of turbot was a kraut to end all krauts, studded with pastrami and suffused with butter and olive oil.

Sumptuous appetizer crepes already had a Russian name — blinchiki — and thus a Russian pedigree, so Mr. Robins was free to stuff them with goat cheese, duck confit and yet more chanterelles. He didn’t toy around too much with the borscht, which had a brilliant ruby color and brimmed with fresh dill. And the potato pancakes with a fluffy lunchtime omelet were faithfully rendered and wholly on target, hitting that crunchy-oily bull’s-eye.

More than a few dishes weren’t so successful. Tea-smoked sturgeon had an acrid aftertaste. The chicken Kiev, unexpectedly straightforward, did a rubbery impersonation of airline food, and I mean coach. There are nearly a dozen kinds of caviar — foreign, domestic, wild, farmed — and several of the ones I tried had an excessively pasty texture, lacking any bouncy pop.

The kitchen was also bedeviled by inconsistency. Buckwheat blini that were golden and fluffy one visit were charred and leaden the next.

ut this restaurant’s real shortcoming is its service, unforgivably poor in the context of dinner entrees that frequently exceed $40, appetizers that infrequently fall below $18 and 30-gram servings of caviar that cost as much as $300.

Outdated menus with erroneous information were put on the table. Drinks and food were ludicrously slow to arrive. Servers responded dismissively to complaints, one of them telling us that we shouldn’t bother him with questions about a fugitive bottle of wine. It was, he shrugged, the sommelier’s problem.

And what a problem. Although we had ordered a 1998 French Burgundy for $84, we got a 2001. We flagged the discrepancy, and for the next 15 minutes, as we ate our appetizers and thirsted for pinot noir, both the wine and sommelier were on the lam. When he showed up, he presented us with a similar 1998 — the listed one was unavailable for $20 more. He paused, seemingly waiting for us to agree to spend that.

Then, in the manner of a car salesman, he said: “I’ll make you a deal. We’ll call it an even $90.”

Could he throw in cruise control? A leather interior?

He later dropped the price to $84, the right end to a wrong situation that typified the restaurant’s clumsiness.

Around since 1926, the Russian Tea Room has been teetering like an outmoded regime for more than a decade, its ownership repeatedly changing, its doors closing for years on end. Its last incarnation, which shut down in 2002, was rated satisfactory by William Grimes in The New York Times in 1999.

This incarnation, owned by Gerald Lieblich, opened nearly two months ago, and it looks like a vivid memory made real. Velvet ropes point you to a revolving glass door, which in turn leads you to the Santa-red booths and spruce-green walls of the ground-floor dining room, where every day is Christmas. (An upstairs dining room — the one with the translucent bear — remains under wraps.)

And at times the experience indeed feels like a gift. The desserts fulfill their sweet obligations, though apart from a pair of blintzes, they’re geographically unbound. That was truest of the best of them, a buttermilk panna cotta with lingonberries and hazelnuts.

To another chef’s stroganoff, it might be an eccentric coda. To Mr. Robins’s, it’s as logical a next course as any other. In terms of food and all else, the Russian Tea Room doesn’t add up neatly or quite make sense. Maybe that’s its way of paying homage to the motherland.

The Russian Tea Room location and menu

150 West 57th Street; (212) 581-7100.

ATMOSPHERE A czarist fantasy, which is to say near-parody, of opulence, with a ground-floor dining room of bright red booths and dark green walls.

SOUND LEVEL Somewhat loud.

Russian Tea Room recommended dishes

Borscht; blinchiki; goose carpaccio; hamachi tataki; foie gras pelmeni; roasted turbot with pickled cabbage; pork tenderloin with stuffed cabbage; beef stroganoff; poached lobster; buttermilk panna cotta.

WINE LIST International, with a French emphasis, and expensive, although with many bottles under $50.

PRICE RANGE Lunch appetizers, $14 to $25; entrees, $27 to $35. Dinner appetizers, $15 to $22; entrees, $32 to $48; desserts, $12.

HOURS Lunch or brunch 11:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. and dinner 5 to 11 p.m. seven days a week.

RESERVATIONS Call two weeks ahead for prime times.

CREDIT CARDS All major cards.

WHEELCHAIR ACCESS Entrance and main dining room at street level; elevator to accessible restrooms below.

WHAT THE STARS MEAN:

(None) Poor to satisfactory

* Good

** Very good

*** Excellent

**** Extraordinary

Ratings reflect the reviewer’s reaction to food, ambience and service, with price taken into consideration. Menu listings and prices are subject to change.