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When
flamboyant restaurateur Warner LeRoy died of cancer in 2001, his
youngest daughter Jennifer Oz inherited his mantle. It was shaky
and so was she.
The shakes are gone now. Although, as CEO of LeRoy Adventures Inc.,
she had to shutter the landmark Russian Tea Room, LeRoy has brought
revenues to nearly $40 million and turned Tavern on the Green into
the highest grossing restaurant in America. (It was second
to Windows on the World.)
She has revamped the menu and venue, started her own trendy custom
made clothing and accessory line of studded phone covers, hair brushes,
compacts, key chains, t-shirts, hats, and shorts called Jenny'z
to sell in the Tavern's boutique as well as other New York City
boutiques and with her mother Kay LeRoy (Warner's second wife from
whom he was divorced) has redesigned the Tavern Gift Shop. (In 1999
she began decorating cell phone cases for friends as a hobby: her
own Dell laptop is encrusted with Swarovski crystals. "I always
wanted to work in fashion," she admits. "Dad had another
vision.") Now she's scouting sites for a Tavern on the Green
restaurant and hotel in Las Vegas.
Despite the fact that their last conversation was an argument that
she hadn't pulled out all the stops when Michael Jackson came to
dine, Warner LeRoy's 18-page will named his youngest of four to
be the boss. He had named her VP 15 months before he died.
LeRoy had been immersed in the restaurant business before taking
over Tavern, but her youth was a big drawback. She overcame that
with hard work and tenacity and going with her gut. "Most of
my decisions are instinctive, and that is something that's unrelated
to how old you are or what experience you've had."
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Kay and
Jennifer LeRoy
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Jennifer LeRoy had a privileged childhood. At her bat mitzvah
at the family's Amagansett estate, airplanes dived in trick
plays over the house; costumed characters from the Wizard
of Oz (which her grandfather Mervyn LeRoy produced and directed)
welcomed guests; stilt-walkers and magicians worked the crowd.
Her great-grandfather, Harry Warner, was a founder of Warner
Brothers Studios.
But those early days were not without problems. LeRoy is
dyslexic, she flunked out of ritzy private school Dalton,
endured a brief spell at a boot-camp-style school in Idaho
and was badly injured in an equestrian accident as a teen
participating in the Hamptons Classic. (She has since placed
high in the legendary competition.)
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But she also was immersed in the ways of the business. "On
vacations we always tried new restaurants, new foods, new chefs
and dad scrutinized everything from the ambiance, to the service,
to the plates, every small detail," she recalls. When her father
asked her to hostess at Tavern on the Green when she was 18, she
asked for a more challenging shift in the kitchen. She shadowed
the expediter who assembled the 2,000 or so dinners the restaurant
serves nightly, worked as a pastry line cook, prep cook, on the
hot line (grill and sauté) and as dishwasher. She hauled
produce crates, rolled pats of butter and learned how to fix whatever
broke, "When you're the director of operations on a Sunday
morning and it's 90 degrees outside, you're the one responsible
for making it nice and cool," she says.
Later, she dropped out of Fordham to work for her father as the
Russian Tea Room's director of operations. Tavern on the Green has
been-and continues to be-an institutional cash cow - a slam-dunk
for weddings, graduations, and corporate meetings. But the Russian
Tea Room-which her dad purchased from Faith Stewart-Gordon for $6.5
million, only to spend four years razing and turning it into an
extravaganza like his earlier property, Maxwell's Plum-was a listing
ship. Jennifer tried to woo customers with ladies-who-lunch salads
and whimsical desserts as she oversaw its four kitchens and hosted
its celebrity guests. But there were enough of them to keep the
colossus afloat. "Closing the Russian Tea Room was the hardest
and saddest decision I have ever had to make," she says.
 Although
she inherited the kingdom via nepotism, Jennifer Leroy is fueling
it with sweat equity. Running the company is not about cracking
open a bottle of champagne with a sword as her theatrical dad could
do. It's about putting in the hours. From September to January she
works six to seven days a week, at the front of the house as manager
or maitre d' or in the back of the house in the kitchen. The buck
stops with her. She has repaired air conditioners and refrigerators
and when the gas went out, bought 120 mini stoves for her kitchen
to cook almost 1000 dinners. "Nobody knew a thing. I come from
a theatrical family. It's in my genes. We believe the show must
go on, without anyone in the dining room knowing what's going on
backstage," she says. "My job is to make it all look seamless.
Dad used to say that the restaurant business is like the theater
business. Every day when the curtain goes up, the playhouse has
to be ready. It helps to fall in love with the chaos and intensity."
Jennifer LeRoy, who has appeared in Teen Vogue and who credits
her mother as being the most important person in her life considers
her greatest accomplishment to be motivating her staff and building
a team. "I've learned that if you roll up your sleeves and
put yourself into a job, working alongside others and everyone respects
one another it makes a great place to work for employees and customers
can sense that," she says. "There is no 'I' in team."
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