The Russian Tea Room is now the last surviving vestige of former owner Warner LeRoy’s legacy, thanks to the recent sale of Tavern on the Green’s every last screw and socket. Although the RTR has been in other hands since 2006, it remains a shrine to LeRoy’s tacky yet endearing vision: the samovars, the czarist kitsch and all that burnished gold, red and green.
Perhaps with Tavern’s end in mind, the RTR recently launched a charm offensive. There’s a $25 “children’s tea menu” (chamomile, sweetie?). It offered a stripped-down $35 menu for Restaurant Week. “Tours” of rarely used upper floors made their way into the Times’ dining blog. CBS News’ travel editor broadcast his radio show from the joint.
For good measure, the owners hired a well-regarded publicist who’s been calling food writers to share “what they’re doing differently.” My curiosity was piqued. I hadn’t been there since January 2007. At the time, it was reeling from a withering Times review and the loss of its chef.
But, I wrote then, you couldn’t yet call the old Lucite bear — still revolving like a street wacko on the empty second floor — down for the count. Unlike most eateries, the RTR pays no rent because its owner also owns the building.
Three years later, despite claiming to draw “boldface names and the intellectual elite,” the place is often a Siberia barren even of peasant life. Last Friday, Open Table showed availability on Saturday night and Sunday. When a joint as schmaltzy as the RTR doesn’t sell out for Valentine’s Day a month ahead, what might the reason(s) be?
Let us begin.
The RTR has been plagued by rude and/or moronic hostesses since the LeRoy days, but current management has actually one-upped the zaniness: Last Saturday night, customers were told to schlep their own coats down a flight of stairs to the checkroom.
Friends arriving ahead of us couldn’t be seated until we were “complete” and subsequently endured being asked their names three times by dazed receptionists.
Nine of 11 dinner entrees are $36 to $48. I had my fill of them last week — one night when the house was empty, the other when it was busy. No additional visits could make a difference; this is a kitchen beyond hope of rescue.
A $38 Shashlik “tasting” was evidently inspired by the shoe Khrushchev pounded at the UN: skewered chicken, beef and lamb burnt to a uniform leather no street vendor could likely replicate.
Watery short-ribs borscht tasted only faintly of beet or beef. Chicken Kiev ($38) contained mysterious hollows apparently meant for herbs that took the night off. It came with a motley toss of, apparently, whatever lay around the house: dates, wild rice, stone-hard carrots and a lonely sprig of broccolini.
Supermarket-grade herring and gravlax appetizers, $19 and $22, looked cut with scissors. Of the mucilaginous latter, my friend mused, “What did they cure the salmon in?” In the refrigerator, maybe. Desserts at $18 a pop recalled desperate, 2 a.m. diner visits.
The hapless kitchen is led by one Marc Taxiera, who previously toiled at Italian restaurant Beppe on East 22nd Street. Beppe is owned by the same, secretive gent behind the Tea Room. What’s baffling is how a chef who did creditable work at Beppe could lend his name to an operation as lame as the Russian Tea Room.
It’s the more depressing because the place still has almost enough going for it to make you yearn for long-extinct glory (see “Tootsie”). The main-floor dining room with red leather booths (but not the cavernously gloomy second floor) remains a feast for the eyes, at least. The wine list boasts good buys if you search.
Floor service is pleasant; one very winning waitress, who deserves to work for a better place, cheerfully alerts you to the cost of champagne “toasts” and to beef stroganoff “that isn’t like everybody else’s” — not a stew, but filet mignon mounted atop buckwheat noodles, a better choice than the rest.
But neither gimmicks nor publicity can redeem dishes as horrible as many of the RTR’s. Do the owners simply not get it? Or are they trying to burn through more rubles for reasons only the Kremlin might comprehend?