The Russian Tea Room: A Love Story

This disorganized but good-natured recollection takes readers inside New York's famous restaurant, which was founded in 1927 by members of the Russian Imperial Ballet. Stewart-Gordon--the perky name-dropper and former actress who inherited the restaurant from her husband, Sidney Kaye, in 1967--charmingly recalls stories from the Tea Room (most of them comic, at least in retrospect), like the time the restaurant flooded and the diners just went on eating, or when Dustin Hoffman showed up in drag for his role in Tootsie. Stewart-Gordon can also switch abruptly from comic routines to the highly personal, as when she affectionately describes a typical evening with her second husband in a mock stage script, then immediately afterwards details how that marriage ended with a bitter divorce. (Her marriage to Kaye sounds less than idyllic as well: she offhandedly tells of a night that she tried to strangle him and he gave her a black eye.) Celebrity appearances are the draw here, and there are plenty of cameos from the restaurant's heyday in the 1970s and '80s: Sam Cohn, Woody Allen, Richard Burton, Helen Gurley Brown and Russian defectors Mikhail Baryshnikov and Rudolph Nureyev are some of the names that crop up. The appeal of this book may be generational--it will entertain those who thrill to hearing stories of Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, but may be lost on those who know them best as Ben Stiller's parents. Photos. (Oct.) FYI: Publication is timed to the reopening of the Russian Tea Room, which closed in 1995.