My wife and I went for their Tea Service on a recent Sunday afternoon and were horrified.
First of all, it was expensive, but I can get past expensive if it's good.

We started with a glass of champagne each and sat in a very nice sort of love seat that is spacious and comfortable in the main floor dining room, which is very well maintained and preserved from the days of Warner LeRoy, the previous owner.
We were surrounded by groups of obnoxiously loud women presumably in the midst of throwing bachelorette parties or bridal showers for unimpressed younger table guests.

Our order was taken by a disheveled waitress with a heavy Queens/Brooklyn accent who spoke casually to a fault. I was expecting a more sophisticated serving method from "The Russian Tea Room", but that's fine.
Our tea was served promptly and was enjoyable.
At some point a waiter carrying a tray past our table was pushed off balance by a woman across from us as she exited her seat. The waiter fell full-body across our table spilling our champagne a bit as we scrambled to grab all our stuff.
No big deal but when the waiter got up he didn't even look at us to see if we were ok or at what he might have spilled. He just walked away. So did the woman.
Our tea sandwiches came within minutes and were a good-enough selection but were absolutely flavorless and served on stale bread.
We were dressed very well, it was my wife's birthday and we tried to make the best of it. We didn't want to complain but I did want to ask the waitress if she could bring us something more fresh from the kitchen so we stopped eating until she came back to the table. She never did. We never saw our waitress again that day. At some point a maitre'd asked us how we were doing and we said we'd been looking for our waitress and so he went to go find her.
That was the last we saw of the maitre'd that day.
Finally we ate our stale sandwiches out of sheer hunger, paid our $200+ check and cut our losses.
All in all, it was a mess. I'd call it a tourist trap but, although several patrons did, many of the people there did not strike me as tourists. Rather they just seemed like older obnoxious well-heeled locals who treated the RTR like their living room.

The RTR should have stayed closed and remained a fond NYC memory instead of reopening as the unforgivably substandard catering facility it is now.

Good grief! Hub and I stayed near there and were tempted to take tea--am glad now we didn't. I hoped you complained.

Reviews have been terrible everywhere. Can't imagine being in that area and not going to one of the great hotels (Plaza, Essex House, St. Regis, Pierre) or even Petrossian for tea. Sorry it was such a mess. PLEASE write up this review on Yelp and Menupages. Hopefully the birthday had some other redeeming moments.

I was tempted to write this review based on many rave comments on Tripadvisor. They have to all be planted by shills....
What a mess.

A New Yorker with a NY accent? The horror!

Well I don;t think you have any right too complain about the server's "accent" - you are in New York and will hear every accent imaginable.

As for the rest of your experience - I have seen and heard only poor to awful things about this place since reopening. Would not have gone at all. And considering how bad your experience I would have gone to the manager and asked for a partial refund.

Agree - there are many better place to go. And you should make a written complain wherever possible.

I didn't even know it had reopened -- again. Is it in the same location on 57th St?

Yes, 57th, with a very forlorn-looking doorman in what passes for Imperial Russian garb out front.

I think OP expected a Russian accent--wouldn't you?

A NYer with a NY accent is no big deal, but most decently educated New Yorkers have something less intense than the Lawng Guyland vocational school patois that the OP seems to have described. If the server's accent is that thick, s/he likely should not have been hired at a putatively upscale restaurant. Just because someone is in a NY restaurant, the patron should not expect, nor excuse, an accent that is the five boroughs equivalent of a backwater Ozark.

The flip side is that a lot non-NYers think even the slightest touch of a NY accent is thick. Neither my dad, myself nor my brothers sound like Noo Yawkers, (and I've been told by a lot of folks in the deep South that they can't tell where I'm from, just not from the South) but my Texan wife hears it in her mind's ear.

And I agree, when you get crap service, you talk to the manager and tell him/her it was crap service. The fact that the OP almost got knocked on his a-- means he should have had a freebie (sounds like that was about the value of the experience . . . ).

It was a tourist trap in the 1960s, too.

Nureyev was said to frequent the place, but he and his ilk must have been seated in a dining room the rest of us never saw.

The borscht was good.

HTTY

More than 12 years ago I went to two small holiday parties upstairs. They were fine but that was a long time ago.

Um, being a server in a restauarant doesn't require any sort of degree that I am aware of. And someone having an accent is no reason they can;t be a top quality server. If you feel the server was unprofessional - perhaps it is on a par with everything else the management does - including paying servers the same wage they would get at a diner.

Ciaony,

Thank you for warning us what we might experience if we go for high tea at The Russian Tea Room. I'm sorry the experience fell so far short of your expectations.

HTTY

About the accent: It was a minor point I made. The much larger one being that her demeanor was at the level of diner service, which of course is fine, when ordering the $9.95 special in my Carhartt

I promise you that none of the New Yorkers on this board has a thicker New York accent than I do.

I was born and raised in Staten Island in a blue-collar family business of which I am now the owner.

My wife (from Queens) and I travel well and frequently and moved to SoHo 11 years ago. I understand both sides of the issue.

I write much better than I speak and that's my point; there being a time to turn it off and put on your business voice.

Serving $200 Champagne Tea Service is one of those times.

End rant.

Yes - but this is still aamanagement issue (obviously it is abysmal) rather than a server one.

That's very true and I hope that point came across.