"It had a huge impact on me," he says, seated on one of the leather couches in his vast Deco-style Upper West Side apartment. Bronze sixteenth-century Japanese temple dogs roar at each other across the foyer, and a self-portrait of Picasso hangs on the same wall as Walt Disney's own drawing of the Seven Dwarfs. All of New York is a hazy toy city 59 stories below.

"I loved the midgets. I remember skipping down the yellow-brick road and suddenly coming up against the painted backdrop. It was a child's dream. I never forgot that sense of color -- and fantasy," says LeRoy, whose youngest daughter bears the middle name Oz.

LeRoy Adventures is only a short ride away, on Broadway -- and its chairman likes to be chauffeured there in a beige limo that some people have called pink. ("When I go out, I can distinguish it from all the other waiting limos," LeRoy says.) Amid a large library of art books and design magazines, men and women with degrees in engineering and architecture do their level best to bring the boss's ideas into the real world.

LeRoy's attention to detail approaches the ridiculous. One summer design meeting with his staff had a 30-item agenda including the following matters: the distance above the bulb that the wall-sconce shades should be, the precise amount of lower-back support the red leather banquettes ought to provide, the melting speed of the ice-Kremlin vodka bar, the relative shininess of the chrome balls the bear aquarium would juggle, whether the natural fissures in the malachite and jasper on the fourth floor's fireplace mantel should match up, whether the digitally produced wood-grain design on the wainscoting looked too factory-made, and what the granite on the vanities in the second- and fourth-floor bathrooms should look like.

Jeffrey Higginbottom, LeRoy's chief designer, has a degree in set design from Yale and bears an uncanny resemblance to William H. Macy, the actor who played the haplessly scheming husband in Fargo. "We are actually putting on a show here, and Warner is the director," says Higginbottom, mopping sweat from his brow in the Danbury warehouse where the egg tree was undergoing inspection in July. "He's got to have his hand in every little aspect of the restaurant business, even down to the toilet paper."

Higginbottom has been with LeRoy since the seventies. "He's certainly not the king of minimalism," Higginbottom says dryly. "It's got to be over-the-top, and if it's not, Warner will extend himself into it."

In the seventies, LeRoy designed and co-owned the Great Adventure theme park in New Jersey, with its menagerie of lions and tigers and bears right off the Garden State Parkway. He was convinced the animals ought to be able to mingle as they did in a real jungle. "I had this idea that if you gave the animals enough space, they'd learn to love each other," LeRoy says. "It didn't work that way. For the lions and tigers and cheetahs, it was all about food, and when we mixed them with the antelope and deer -- oh, my God. Well, we had to immediately stop it. But we were able to mix the antelopes and deer and rhinos. And now the Bronx Zoo does something similar." LeRoy jumped out of Great Adventure when Hardwicke, his partner in the park, went belly-up. But his imprimatur remains on several theme parks in Canada and Great Britain.

LeRoy explains his modus operandi, which is straight out of old Hollywood: "Once, at Tavern on the Green, Billy Wilder spotted a single lightbulb out in a chandelier," LeRoy remembers. "I think I have that kind of eye. I say what's wrong with it, not what's right about it."

Tavern on the Green in Central Park is perhaps the city's best-known restaurant (among out-of-towners, that is). But LeRoy first lumbered into the restaurant business when he decided to open the world's first singles bar, in the late sixties.

That was Maxwell's Plum, which single-handedly made ferns, brass, and stained-glass accents de rigueur in a certain type of burger-beer-and-babe joint across the nation. The sexual revolution was nascent when Maxwell's opened at 64th Street and First Avenue in the spring of 1966. and LeRoy himself was astounded at the opening-night crowd, since he had done nothing to advertise the place. But in a city where bars and restaurants were still windowless relics of Prohibition, a sidewalk café with open windows on several sides was something new. Six policemen were required to control the crowd. Over the years, LeRoy expanded into the building next door and eventually was serving thousands of patrons a day. And while the bar attracted its share of hairy-chested, chain-wearing Lotharios and lots of stewardesses, nurses, and secretaries, the younger glamorati also found the scene to be a likable circus: Donald met Ivana here.

Restaurateur George Lang, owner of Café des Artistes, ran across LeRoy when Lang was developing ideas for Restaurant Associates and LeRoy approached him with his idea for Maxwell's Plum. LeRoy's sister, Linda Janklow, had asked Lang to talk her brother out of the restaurant business. But when he heard LeRoy's dream of creating a restaurant that was also a public meeting place on the scale of a Roman forum, Lang says he was hard put to dissuade him. "I was surprised at the brilliant concept," Lang recalls. "He changed whole aspects of the business with Maxwell's Plum. And he's gone on to make Tavern on the Green profitable, where others failed for years."

LeRoy's critics are fond of complaining that he tends to focus on the restaurant's looks at the expense of its food. But he is determined to prove them wrong. Throughout the summer, LeRoy and his assistants, managers, and consultants assembled around a table at Tavern on the Green twice a week. Fabrice Canelle, the Paris-born chef hired for the Tea Room, sent out plate after plate heaped with experimental Russian-inspired dishes. LeRoy, who gained 80 pounds last year and has been cautioned by his doctors not to gain any more weight, gamely cleaned his plates while pouring Equal into his cappuccino.

Most visitors to Moscow do not return raving about the drab, meat-heavy cuisine, but true Russian cuisine was once rich and varied, influenced by the cultures that rim Russia -- including those of China, Japan, and Scandinavia. And, of course, there was the lasting influence of French chefs who were imported to work in the kitchens of the Russian nobility. Canelle, a veteran of Brasserie Savoy in San Francisco, spent seven months creating 500 dishes and testing some 1,000 recipes LeRoy had had translated from the original Russian for Canelle's predecessor.