He's also introduced a few nifty new sideshows: An ice sculpture that looks like the Kremlin, incorporating bottles of premium vodka and champagne, will be wheeled around the premises (an outfit in Westchester will deliver fresh Kremlins three times daily). Bartenders will be spiking shots of borscht with vodka -- a drink LeRoy invented and named the Borscht Belt. A Russian-studies professor from Williams College has been drafted to help the French chef create adapted Russian dishes -- coulibiac of salmon with beurre rouge, beef Stroganoff with potato soufflé, truffled-quail Kiev -- that won't offend the palates of modern-day Manhattan food snobs. LeRoy attempted to import chiseled-cheeked Slavic hostesses from the Old Country, but visa troubles foiled that plan.

Tea Room regulars won't be scandalized by what has gone on here. It's the two floors upstairs -- reserved for corporate events and weddings and open to the public for holidays only -- that would induce even the most dissipated aristocrat to choke on his Beluga. They are LeRoy's own Potemkin Chartres: Twenty-foot-high ceilings coruscate with backlit Tiffany-made glass (one was salvaged from Maxwell's Plum in New York). Walls shimmer with iridescent blue glass tiles made from titanium and other elements pulverized in an atom smasher in Oregon. Golden hares scamper across jet-glass walls, etched bears ice-skate and gambol on mirrored panels, and tiered brass chandeliers sand-cast in India are festooned with dancing bears. The aquarium will be filled with live sturgeon when and if LeRoy can find a way to keep the fish happy: He is thinking he may have to hire a fish psychologist to help them adjust to life in the bear's round belly (sturgeon are customarily bottom-dwellers and prefer square tanks). He is also anticipating the arrival of a gypsy-style band he discovered in Venice's Piazza San Marco -- after the contract and visa problems are sorted out, that is.

But even LeRoy says he can still recognize when more is just too much: At the last minute, he decided not to hang the year-round Christmas decorations on the chandeliers and wainscoting, as was done in the old Tea Room. "In the original Tea Room, where things were much simpler, it worked," he says. "But somehow, after all I put into this one, they actually took away from the room."

The space was considerably more subdued in all of its previous incarnations. A Russian émigré named Zissman opened the original Tea Room on the north side of West 57th Street in 1926 (it moved to its present location across the street a year later). Only pastries and the eponymous drink were served, mostly to homesick Russian exiles, especially artists, musicians, dancers, and actors who were attached to Carnegie Hall, next door, or the Art Students League nearby. In 1932, another Russian, Sasha Maieff, bought the place and began serving meals; after Prohibition, Maieff replaced the soda fountain with a bar.

In the mid-forties, Sidney Kaye -- whose parents were Russian émigrés but who spoke not a word of Russian himself -- took over the Tea Room, and he ran it until his death in 1967. That's when his wife, Faith Stewart-Gordon, took it over. The staff remained mostly Russian throughout the forties and fifties, but the Russian clientele slowly was replaced with a new crowd -- theater people hanging around the Actors Studio run by Lee Strasberg and Harold Clurman in the Carnegie Hall building. Anne Meara, Jerry Stiller, Arthur Miller, Beverly Sills, Carol Channing, Alan Arkin, Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Jason Robards, Michael Caine, Liza Minnelli, Lee Grant, Sidney Poitier, Sidney Lumet, Sidney Pollack, and Garson Kanin are just a few of the marquee names that regularly lit up the reservations list. Sightings of Marlon and Woody in their chinos and Ray-Bans and Jackie O. with her latest lunch date got the kind of ink Gwyneth and Leo get today.

Of course, real Russians continued to swan through over the years, including defecting Soviet dancers Nureyev, Makarova, Godunov, and Baryshnikov. But by the seventies, a regular booth at the Tea Room was the ultimate entertainment-broker status symbol. In this blood-red craw of power, ICM agent Sam Cohn claimed table No. 1. Dustin Hoffman and Arthur Miller are said to have agreed to collaborate on Death of a Salesman at the Tea Room, and later, Hoffman and Streep were paired for the movie Kramer vs. Kramer at Cohn's table. It was a New York where the action still unfolded in midtown, and the food fanatic hadn't yet been born who would presume to be repulsed by a Russian menu.

LeRoy says he's personally invited the old regulars -- and they are old now -- to return, but no one believes the new Tea Room can re-create the magic of the original. There was a diaspora when the Tea Room was sold to LeRoy and closed in 1995, but even before that, charter members were more likely to see each other at funerals than over lunch.

"It was the first place I went on my first day at Cosmo: March 15, 1965," says longtime Cosmopolitan editor-in-chief Helen Gurley Brown, who lunched with Gloria Steinem, Yul Brynner, and Nora Ephron at her favorite tables, Nos. 1 and 2. "I must have signed hundreds of thousands of expense reports for employees' lunches at the Tea Room."

Society bandleader Peter Duchin would order the Tea Room's chef's salad; for a time, he lived upstairs in Carnegie Hall Studios. "They treated regulars in a very different way," he says. "I'd sit down and everything was brought to me. There were always many famous faces there, and they were left alone. If I was sitting there with Kim Novak, no one would bother us."

Although the Tea Room was one of the first New York restaurants to have preferred tables, LeRoy claims he is going to discourage that elitist sort of thing. "The Tea Room has a long history of special people getting special tables. A lot of them are my friends, and I'm going to try to talk them out of it," LeRoy says. "I don't attract people because I fawn over them. I'm democratic." LeRoy strenuously denies reports that he's opened up a private reservations line for people with important biographies; he says he's merely set up a number for about 200 old Tea Room customers that was included in the letters inviting them back.

LeRoy's populist spirit might not bring the old crowd back from the dead (or from Michael's or San Domenico), and anyway, LeRoy's not taking any chances: He's put hipster 28-year-old publicist Lizzie Grubman on the payroll, hoping her database of the young and fabulous will give the Tea Room the injection of cool it needs. "We have retained Lizzie for the first six months to deal with the downtown crowd," LeRoy says. "I think it's going to be a great late-night scene, and young people are the ones who stay out late." Grubman has already booked Britney Spears's 18th-birthday party and a record-release blowout for Savage Garden into the space.

So kids with pierced eyebrows in Gap cargo pants will be doing vodka shots at Sam Cohn's table. But then, the surreal spectacle has always played a prominent role in the life of Warner LeRoy. A scion of the Warner Bros. family -- LeRoy is the grandson of Harry Warner, and Jack Warner's great-nephew -- the little movie prince lived in a universe bounded, literally, by a painted sky. When Warner was 4 years old, his father, director Mervyn LeRoy, made The Wizard of Oz. The studio set is Warner's earliest memory.