When a restaurant gets off to a shaky start the way the Russian Tea Room has, a high-priced chef is often the first to go. And sure enough, after running into trouble — which became apparent early on, when we noted a less “than a quarter-capacity crowd at 9 p.m. on Saturday night” — the Tea Room has just given chef Gary Robins his walking papers. But Robins didn't take his dismissal lying down, giving the Eater boys a detailed insider's account of the near-chaos engulfing the place — not to mention a long passage from an e-mail he wrote to owner Hasan Biberaj, calling his behavior “deceitful and wrong.”

Robins on Russian Tea Room: 'Opened Without Being Ready, Understaffed in All Areas' [Eater]