Russian Tea Room

 restaurant, interesting place, 1875_construction, movie / film / TV location, commercial building

6-story commercial building completed in 1875 as a private house by German immigrant John F. Pupke, a tea and coffee merchant. It was later converted into apartments and stores, and now four floors of the building are occupied by The Russian Tea Room, a restaurant opened in 1927 by former members of the Russian Imperial Ballet. Frequented at first by Russian expatriates, it later became a gathering place for members of the entertainment industry.

British comedian Rowan Atkinson married Sunetra Sastry here in 1990. Scenes from Sweet Smell of Success, Manhattan, When Harry Met Sally, The Turning Point, Smurfs, Tootsie, and New York Stories were filmed at the restaurant, as well as "The Wrath of Con" episode of Gossip Girl, and the "Dad" episode of Louie. It was a favored dining place of, among other notables, Ayn Rand and Wanda Toscanini Horowitz. It is depicted in a painting by Beryl Cook. In 1982, Madonna worked here, as a coat-check clerk.

In the early 1980s developer Harry Macklowe was buying properties for an assemblage around the building at 150 West 57th, intending to combine them for a large tower. The owner of the Russian Tea Room, Faith Stewart-Gordon, refused to sell, and as a result, the Metropolitan Tower and Carnegie Hall Tower were built on either side, with a gap of a mere 20 feet in between.

The north facade of the building, on 57th Street, is faced in white-painted stone. The ground floor has a central main entrance with a revolving door in a bronze frame. To the left is a bronze-framed poster box, and to the right a bronze paneled double-door. A rounded, red vinyl canopy covers both entrances, extending out over the sidewalk, with a small extension over the poster box. The upper floors have a single bay of windows in the middle of the facade. There is a tripartite window on the 2nd floor, flanked by wall-mounted lanterns, and a large panel at the 3rd floor bearing gilded sculptures of three bears and ribbons. A stack of three more tripartite windows fill the 4th-6th floors, with a small, projecting balcony at the 6th floor that has a bronze railing and projecting flagpole. At the top of the facade is a parapet with a cutout of the same size of the windows below, with a screen pattern of radiating bronze bars. The top of the parapet is stepped up in the center.

The rear, south-facing facade on 56th Street is faced in dark-orange-red stone paneling (grey at the base) with two metal service doors at the ground floor. The upper floors each have a small horizontal rectangular window in a metal frame. The east-facing side wall that fronts the plaza of Metropolitan Tower is faced in the same stone panels, with no openings. A large, 2-story sign for the Russian Tea Room is mounted to the front edge of the wall at the 3rd-4th floors.

The interior was used as a filming location for S3E9 of the Showtime original series "Billions".

www.russiantearoomnyc.com/