ABSTRACT
When in 1999 the late Warner LeRoy reopened New York’s famous Russian Tea Room, the city’s sophisticates complained that “his taste for rococo shimmer and dazzle was just noisy kitsch, that his pursuit of the fantastic sometimes crossed the line from exuberance to wretched excess” (Asimov 2001: A11). New York Times restaurant critic William Grimes confirmed the “appalling” result,
… upstairs, Mr. LeRoy has pulled out the stops, and he has proceeded with the confidence, and the taste, of a newly minted Moscow billionaire.
