Warner LeRoy, a son of Hollywood pioneers who combined show business glamour with circus ballyhoo to create New York restaurants like Maxwell's Plum, Tavern on the Green and the new Russian Tea Room, died Thursday night at New York Presbyterian Hospital. He was 65.
The cause of death was complications of lymphoma, the family said.
Mr. LeRoy brought drama and entertainment to a business focused on cooking and hospitality. He envisioned restaurants as stage sets and threw everything into his designs, with the aim not merely of decorating but also of animating customers. The swinging singles of the 1960's came to life in Maxwell's Plum, the first and perhaps the most significant of Mr. LeRoy's dreamlands, which achieved a social significance in its era that rivaled that of the Stork Club of the 1940's and 50's.
Some said 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. Others thought of him as an artist — Paul Goldberger, writing in The New York Times , once called him "New York's mad genius" — and, in fact, architecture and design writers seemed more interested than food critics in his restaurants. But no matter who was critiquing, his emphasis on production values transformed how restaurants looked and how people felt about them.
"Nobody can out-showbiz Warner in a restaurant, and probably nobody would want to, but in defining the edges so authoritatively, everybody took notice," said Danny Meyer, a New York restaurateur. "He forced the rest of us to reckon with how people are going to feel in terms of the drama of our atmosphere. You cannot open a major New York restaurant today and not be aware that showbiz will play a role."
Mr. LeRoy had a wizard's touch, waving a stylish and expensive wand to transform the mundane into fantasy. When he took control of Tavern on the Green in 1973, it was a rustic little money-losing pub. After three years of renovations with enormous cost overruns, the restaurant reopened as a vision of dazzling carved wood, molded plaster ceilings and shimmering glass, with crystal chandeliers, statues and murals. It became one of the top-grossing restaurants in the country despite its mediocre food.
"It is all, on one level, absurd; and yet it is all, on another level, quite wonderful," Mr. Goldberger wrote of Tavern in 1976. "Mr. LeRoy's creation, as a piece of design, goes beyond the conventional limits of taste to create a new and altogether convincing world of its own."
When Mr. LeRoy opened the new Tavern in 1976, it was with hoopla worthy of a big-city Harold Hill, with bands, balloons, models in bikinis and what was billed as the world's largest ice-cream sundae.
Twenty-three years later, the trombones sounded again when Mr. LeRoy took hold of the Russian Tea Room, a beloved but frumpy dowager of a restaurant.
The regulars were shocked when the Tea Room's longtime owner, Faith Stewart-Gordon, sold the restaurant to Mr. LeRoy in 1995. He closed it for renovation on New Year's Day in 1996, and as delays mounted rumors swirled like sightings of Anastasia. They alluded to overly grandiose plans, bankruptcy, health problems and other personal crises. Many people thought the Russian Tea Room would never open again, but open it did.
A visual riot of spangles, bangles, glass dancing bears, mirrors and gold, the new Tea Room attracted an onslaught of photographers on opening day. The food? In a 1999 review, William Grimes of The Times referred to it as "dreary slog" and awarded the restaurant a "satisfactory" rating. But as spectacle, it crackled.
Despite the fanfare surrounding these latter-day crystal temples, they simply followed in the wake of Maxwell's Plum, an explosion of brass, wood, fresh flowers and Tiffany glass at First Avenue and 64th Street that opened in 1966 and closed in 1988.
The smart set — Bill Blass, Barbra Streisand, Warren Beatty and Julie Christie — all came to Maxwell's, whose name, too, seemed a typical flight of 1960's fancy. The restaurant was set up like a three-ring circus, with a main dining room raised so that diners could view the singles' action at the substantial and elegant mahogany bar. The bar, in turn, was above a casual cafe.
The menu ranged from hamburgers and chili to snails and stuffed squab. The restaurant also housed his staggering collection of Tiffany glass and Art Deco and Art Nouveau furnishings and objects.
