LeRoy, serving a picture-perfect lunch on her farmhouse porch, is a natural hostess. (Tamara Beckwith)
After the LeRoys lost their lease on Tavern on the Green, they closed the landmark eatery after one last bash on New Year’s Eve in 2009. It has yet to reopen under the new leaseholder. (
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Warner LeRoy’s Maxwell Plum (above and below) was a swinging scene in the 1960s. Jennifer plans to open her own equally fabulous restaurant with the same name. (
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‘I feel like a Viking warrior princess!” laughs Jennifer LeRoy, 34, as she rides her glistening dark brown show jumper, the Pie, through a field at Oz Farm, her 90-acre country property in Saugerties, NY. “Charge!” she shouts jokingly, her hand raised high above her head. Her brown hair, teased up into an elegant partial faux-hawk she describes as one of her signature coifs, is gleaming and healthy, and she has an early summer tan, the result of many a weekend spent riding at her horse farm.
“Horses,” she says pointedly, “don’t care who you are, or who your family is or which reviewer said what about your restaurant. They keep me grounded and balanced, and they always have.”
LeRoy, the youngest child of famed restaurateur Warner LeRoy, has a theatrical presence and is seemingly indefatigable. Her father passed away in 2001, and she was the only one of his four children interested in taking on his multimillion-dollar business. (Her mother, Kay, divorced Warner in 1999.) At the tender age of 22, she shot to notoriety when she suddenly found herself running two of Manhattan’s most storied eateries, the Russian Tea Room and Tavern on the Green.
Her fortunes changed as the Russian Tea Room shuttered in 2002 and she subsequently lost the prized lease for Tavern on the Green in 2009, a blow to her family, who had run the eatery since 1976.
Today, however, LeRoy is defiantly mining her family’s past in anticipation of her next act.
Describing herself as a “born entertainer,” LeRoy has been up early preparing a lavish summer spread. There’s homemade strawberry lemonade, bacon-wrapped figs stuffed with blue cheese, plates upon plates of tea sandwiches and, of course, plenty of sweets. It’s the sort of gracious, sunny welcome that clients of her new catering company, LeRoy Redux, can expect when they book her. She’s currently hard at work on splashy weddings and posh events like Saturday’s Martinis for Mutts benefit at Seasons of Southampton.
But it’s back in New York where she is getting ready to unveil her newest project, and the one dearest to her heart. In 2014, says LeRoy, “I will be opening a new Maxwell’s Plum downtown.” The exact space is still being determined, but she describes the project as a tribute to her father’s first restaurant, which opened in 1966 on 64th Street and First Avenue and was a hot spot for “swinging singles” and stars like Warren Beatty, Barbra Streisand and Cary Grant.
It was at Maxwell’s Plum that her mother, a British TWA stewardess, first met Warner LeRoy, who told her that night that she would be his wife.
While LeRoy considered naming her new restaurant something else, she ultimately settled on Maxwell’s Plum to pay tribute to her father and her late brother, Max, who died in a motorcycle accident at age 30 in 2005.
The new Maxwell’s Plum, jokes LeRoy, will have the same exuberant spirit as her legendary clan. “You know, just another understated LeRoy affair.”
To that end, she’s teamed up with a construction partner, Joe Giardina of Harbor Management, and has been scouting locations that will boast a showpiece of a dining room and “spectacular banquet facilities, because that’s what we do.”
The new restaurant will feature some of the eatery’s original, over-the-top wall hangings and framed memos her father wrote to the staff. It will, she hopes, be a place where “people want to have lunch and dinner three or four times a week,” a kind of unpretentious hangout for the beautiful people.
Nearly three years after she last set foot in Tavern on the Green, LeRoy is still incredibly nostalgic about her time there.
“I was 22, with a staff of 1,000,” she recalls with pride. But the family empire soon came crashing down around her. First, she was forced to shutter the Russian Tea Room after changing fashions meant it was all but impossible to recoup the $30 million renovation her father had greenlighted.
Then, by law, the city had to open up the Tavern on the Green lease to the highest bidder, leaving the LeRoys in jeopardy.
With uncertainty about the restaurant’s future in the air, the Tavern’s banquet business, already pummeled by the economic crash in 2008, took a hit. In 2010, LeRoy vacated the premises. Though her father had trademarked the Tavern on the Green name, valued at some $19 million, she and her family ultimately lost the rights to it.
A stretch of West 67th Street, named Warner LeRoy Place, now holds bittersweet memories, she says. LeRoy says she’s “incredibly nostalgic” for Tavern on its best days, but: “Let’s just say I don’t go out of my way to drive past it now.”
When asked about its current leaseholder, Emerald Green, a company whose most renowned restaurant is an unremarkable Philadelphia creperie, LeRoy is uncharacteristically curt. “I wish them the best,” she says.
Emerald Green is reportedly still raising the money it requires to open Tavern’s doors. “The saddest part is that 500 people lost their jobs,” she says. “And I think the city misses Tavern on the Green.”
There are those who might raise an eyebrow over a new LeRoy venture, given that some felt her youth was ultimately a fatal handicap for the restaurant. To those detractors, LeRoy is defiant. “Not for a moment am I hesitating about doing another restaurant. I am very confident that my restaurant will be a success. When I do something, I put all my energy to it every day. If it goes away, like Tavern went away, it’s not because I messed up. I didn’t.”
With her family background, LeRoy is both restaurant and Hollywood royalty. She grew up at the Dakota and at the family compound in East Hampton, “was driven to school in a pink limo” at Dalton, and was best friends with her neighbor Sean Lennon, who she says is “like a brother.” Her grandfather, Mervyn LeRoy, produced “The Wizard of Oz” and gave Jenny the middle name “Oz” after seeing his baby granddaughter. A photo of her father meeting Judy Garland hangs in the foyer at Oz Farm, while Jenny’s red-sequin Converse sneakers (“my ruby slippers”) sit casually on the floor nearby.
After Tavern went bankrupt, LeRoy says she felt the financial impact as well as the emotional one. “I grew up not worrying about money, ever. It was definitely unrealistic. What I realize now is that for anybody, your whole life can change at any time.”
After Tavern shuttered, she says, “I got so many calls saying, ‘Why don’t you do this?’ or ‘Can you help me with this?’ They were great opportunities, but I needed to take some time off and spend some time at the farm, and really consider what was next.”
At the farm, where the white vinyl-sided main house is perfectly lovely but decidedly modest, reminders of the past are everywhere, from the vintage Tavern plates and napkins to the framed picture of her father in one of his glitzy, gold sequin jackets. In another picture, LeRoy’s mother, Kay, holds a baby tiger on the grounds of Great Adventure, the New Jersey theme park her family built. The shutters at the barn LeRoy built are emblazoned with wooden slats spelling out “OZ,” while the pink golf cart she uses to navigate the farm also bears Jennifer’s middle name. The pink Carolina Herrera gown she dons for the photo shoot was purchased, she notes with a hint of bitterness, for the Central Park Conservancy Ball in 2005 that was held at Tavern on the Green.
But among LeRoy’s most prized possessions here is a faded, bedazzled T-shirt emblazoned with the logo of Maxwell’s Plum. She is now ready to switch allegiances from protecting Tavern’s legacy to reimagining Maxwell’s. “This,” she says, “is one of the originals. It’s like my most prized possession.”