I've been crazily busy lately, but I got through the majority of my work so I thought I'd sneak on here and write a quick post about my day. So, after two months of trying to plan, my mother finally took me out for my 19th birthday to the Russian Tea Room. If you know nothing about this place, you should. It's a famous restaurant in midtown by Carnegie Hall. I heard about it years ago because of watching Gossip Girl. Everything there is ridiculously expensive. There's a huge menu of tea to choose from, as well as brunch, lunch, dinner, afternoon tea, and more. The restaurant is beautiful, decked out in red and green detailing and gold plated ceilings. There are beautiful paintings everywhere and some original Chagal, Kandinsky, and Picasso. There are four floors, but only the main floor is open regularly for daytime customers. The other three floors are event halls for weddings and such. Here's some of the pictures from the online gallery of the restaurant. We got a private tour of the building. The Bear Room (on the second floor) is a smaller event room; it's called such because of the big bear sculpture in the middle. They used to carve a new ice sculpture every night, but it got messy and expensive, so they decided to just make it an sculpture aquarium. You heard me right: there are fish in that sculpture and a feeding mechanism. They clean it and everything. I thought that was the coolest thing. I really want to have my wedding in the big room with all the chandeliers. I basically spent an hour fawning over everything in the restaurant. I felt so out of place. What really struck me is that there are people who live like this. There were couples in jeans and t-shirts, casually eating caviar at 2 in the afternoon like this was any other Sunday. There are people who live like that. I dressed up for the occasion and still felt out of place. However, a common theme seemed to be that the waiters were asked to take pictures. So maybe I wasn't the only one that felt like this was a special occasion.
I got the Tea Room Salad, Chicken Kiev, and Chocolate Pyramid. The tea service is really interesting. Rather than using regular teacups, they serve tea in glasses with metal holders to pick them up. The tea also came with cookies and tart cherries to flavor it, a Russian specialty! Here's some of my pictures:
The main dining room
Tea service and shortbread cookies!
Chocolate pyramid cake with a birthday candle! (They sung to me in Russian)
Fruit platter
The Bear Room aquarium!
The Bear Room
Overall, it was an experience I'll never forget. I brought home a lot of my food because the portions were huge, so I'll be enjoying this meal for awhile.
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