The Great American Saloon Series/The Russian Tea Room
Brookhiser, Richard
Daisy and Hoke can be seen as a metaphor for the developing relations between the races in the South from the forties to the seventies, the filmmakers don't press this interpretation upon us....
...The samovars look like ornaments too—some big as diver's helmets, some small as traveling hair dryers, all metal and all gleaming so brightly it looks as if the spigots were winking at you...
...I've never succeeded yet...
...The waiters, even the obvious Hispanics, all wear blouses which are meant to suggest Cossacks...
...sometimes, they even take it with good grace...
...Partly it's because the management leaves ornaments on the chandeliers all year round...
...ings on the walls, which hang wherever the management forgot to put a samovar, are supposed to suggest the stuff the Hermitage sent over from its post-Impressionist collection...
...In my experience, East European émigrés are extraordinarily bristly when it comes to any topic having to do with their homelands...
...He was an elderly Englishman who claimed to have heard it from a schoolmate of his, a young Russian emigre from a once-wealthy family...
...It's an unapologetically "small" story, the sort that is often swallowed up helplessly on the big screen—and the ultimate testament to its power is that it fills the screen at every moment...
...Only another Russian" is a mistake, though...
...Partly it's the color scheme: the walls, what you can see of them between paintings and samovars, are a deep, piny green...
...American ignorance upsets them the least...
...E Scott Fitzgerald, not James Branch Cabell...
...The family had been vacationing some place in the south of Russia—perhaps Yalta...
...So no Russian has to come here...
...The pecking order of tables seems to be: tables in the middle of the floor, lowest...
...That's a lot of weight to put on a restaurant, especially when the fare is so substantial to begin with...
...curved booths along the wall, success in New York...
...The tea was really like beer," I read, "but I drank a glass of it.*" At the foot of the page, the helpful mate of the asterisk explains: "*Tea in Russia is usually drunk out of tumblers...
...The retainers who had been maintaining it, as surprised as the travelers, opened it up, and the family rested from its journey...
...There is something Christmasy about the place, which makes it always delightful to visit, but which can also be a bit of a shock when you come in off 57th Street in August...
...Youcan order vodka from a dozen lands, as unlikely as Ireland and Israel...
...Only another Russian could understand the reactionary and Sovietophile blend presented by the pseudo-colorful Komarovs . . . " Sorry I asked...
...The Russian Tea Room takes a more differentiated approach, for there is actually a vodka menu...
...banquette seats along the wall, next...
...We don't know what will become of the Soviet Union...
...We encountered vodka once before, at the Paradise in Brighton Beach (TAS, December 1988...
...the paintRichard Brookhiser is a senior editor of National Review and a columnist for the New York Observer...
...Along the way, one of the servants in the entourage remarked that the area through which they were passing rang a bell of some kind: didn't they own an estate in the neighborhood...
...If it does, it will find some good drink recipes waiting for it left of Carnegie Hall...
...THE GREAT AMERICAN SALOON SERIES THE RUSSIAN TEA ROOM Iwonder how many people learned that Russians drink tea out of glasses the same way that I did, from the Signet Classic edition of The Death of Ivan Ilych and Other Stories...
...If it isn't made in samovars (another discovery of my high school reading) it's not for lack of equipment, for there are several dozen samovars filling strategic shelves on the restaurant's walls...
...The Russian Tea Room is on 57th Street in Manhattan, just east of Carnegie Hall...
...This kind of thing pops up all the time in Nabokov: the Komarovs (a professor and his wife in Pnin) "would throw Russki parties every now and then, with Russki hors d'oeuvres and guitar music and more or less phony folk songs—occasions at which shy graduate students would be taught vodka-drinking rites and other stale Russianisms...
...You can also order a number of vodka drinks with Russki names...
...A plate full of butter is several orders of magnitude less extravagant than an extra house, but both, it seems to me, convey the same spirit...
...But time, when it has a chance to unfold naturally, selects and winnows...
...Vacaby Richard Brookhiser tion over, they headed back to St...
...It sits in a townhouse, scrunched by larger neighbors...
...The reason you've come here, alcoholically speaking, is vodka...
...Tea at the Russian Tea Room is drunk out of tumblers too...
...The price on the cover of my copy is 95 cents, so I learned it a long while ago...
...The following story is hearsay, but I had no reason to doubt the teller...
...The chicken Kiev (the menu calls it by its Frenchy name, cbtelette de Kiev) is very nice, but when your waiter slices it open for you, the butter flows like the Dnieper...
...If the Baltic states are allowed to secede, will the restaurant hop over the concert hall to the other side...
...Ten pages into "The Kreutzer Sonata," the narrator and the man who killed his wife are settling into a long train ride side by side, and the killer offers the narrator some tea...
...An American with an opinion is a different matter...
...Be smart, and order one from Russia or Finland...
...America, to consider our own past, went through a period known as "the twenties...
...Petersburg...
...No one seemed to know, but they asked around until, sure enough, they found a property, unvisited for years...
...Some other Russian would have a slightly different fight to pick with them...
...I wonder what a Russian would think of the place...
...They're smart enough to recognize that the value of Driving Miss Daisy lies in its particularity, in the precision with which it attends to the lives and personalities of these two individuals...
...But all the decorations in the world wouldn't give the place a holiday air if the food and drink weren't copious, with that festive abandon that a Westerner, anyway, associates with Russian dining...
...My favorite is the Pavlova, a creamy concoction which is the color of the thighs of the corps de ballet, and which tastes like mother's milk, but isn't...
...In a time of war and space epics, of super heroes and big-budget special effects, it's nice to be able to say that the most profoundly satisfying movie in a long, long while is a quiet, unpretentious story about people and what they can mean to each other—a film about the brief, luminous moments that add up to a life...
...Inside the door, the general impression is one of great depth, as in a sumptuous bowling alley...
...If the contrary point of view belongs to a fellow emigre, expect tornadoes and hail...
...unless it coincides exactly with the emigre's, the social barometer drops ominously...
...Nostalgia short-circuits the picking and choosing of time by preserving everything, down to the salt shakers...
...Nabokov, if you calmed him down, would have understood...
...Has that changed, in the Age of Gorbachev...
...It may break back into time, and become Russia once more...
...Exile is enforced nostalgia, comprehensiveness imposed by history...
...Slightly to the left of Carnegie Hall," was how their cutesy radio ads used to put it...
...36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1990...
...T he trouble with deciding how 1 "real" the copiousness of a place like the Russian Tea Room is arises from the fact that everything in it has been plucked out of time, and preserved wholesale...
...Nabokov should have written, "Only one other Russian...
...That was a legitimate form of it: sheer alcohol, honest and efficient as a lube job...
...The glass it comes in arrives nestled in its own bowl of ice, looking like some sort of science experiment (cold fusion...
...Sixty years later, only certain things from the twenties have survived—Bix Beiderbecke, not Paul Whiteman...
...You can eat well here too, but be warned—you won't have to eat again for a week...
Vol. 23 • April 1990 • No. 4
