Russian Vodka Room invites guests to spend time with friends while savoring quality vodka and Russian delicacies. Decorated with wooden furniture, artwork and chandeliers, the restaurant creates an ambience of a traditional Russian home.Its menu features caviar, borscht, duck liver pate, meat dumplings and other appetizers, as well as herring under a fur coat, a typical layered salad. Russian Vodka Room’s patrons can dine on main entrées such as beef stroganoff with kasha, a type of porridge, roast duck with apples, prunes and apricots or breaded and pan-seared sea bass. Farmer’s cheese pancakes with chocolate and other desserts are on the menu, as well. As its name implies, Russian Vodka Room serves a wide selection of vodkas and infusions that range from raspberry and cranberry to ginger and garlic pepper and dill vodka. Visitors can also enjoy live piano and jazz concerts.
There is only one way to describe it: Classic Russia in the heart of New York. The history of Russian Samovar starts well before the restaurant itself. Originally Jilly's Canteen, and owned by a friend of Frank Sinatra, Jilly Rizzo, Samovar was the go-to hot spot for Sinatra and The Rat Pack. In 1986, Roman Kaplan, founder of Russian Samovar acquired the property and was joined in 1987 by friends and business partners: Legendary dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov and Nobel Award Winning poet Joseph Brodsky. Baryshnikov's baby grand piano is still used daily by our performers and guests can still request the Brodsky table, where the legends used to sit and drink away the hours. Guests of private events also enjoy our private dining room, where Baryshnikov filmed Sex in the City.Samovar has remained a celebrity hangout over the years. We've been lucky enough to feature impromptu shows by Liza Minelli and rumor has it that Mel Brooks adapted The Producers to film while sitting at our bar.
For ninety-eight years, New York's defining cultural moments have taken place at Russian Tea Room. Ever since members of the Russian Imperial Ballet founded the restaurant in 1926, it has been a second home for boldface names and the intellectual elite-an exclusive enclave where actors, writers, politicians, and businessmen planned their next deals and feted their friends' latest Carnegie Hall performances.
