Trimming the trees

1:09 PM EST, December 20, 2007

For weeks, beginning in the late fall, the electrical staff has been out decking, if not the halls, at least the trees. Up in a cherry-picker, Americo Lample tosses a string of Christmas lights around a branch three stories or so above the gardens behind the main dining rooms. Deftly, he wraps each branch, spacing the coils of lights about an inch or so apart.

"It takes 10 weeks on a very tight schedule to get the lights up," says Edmundo Baquerizo, the restaurant's chief electrician . "The last time I counted -- and this was maybe 15 years ago -- we had close to 300,000 lights. " There are more now -- 750,000 or so.

The lights -- whether you like them or not -- are part of the restaurant's wintry décor; in summer, they're replaced by Chinese lanterns. Both are very much a part of the style Warner LeRoy developed for the place when he reopened it in 1976 after a two-year renovation. "He restored the gardens and built the Crystal Room," says his daughter Jennifer, who has run the retaurant since her father's death in 2001. And he added the stained glass, the elaborate chandeliers, and the mirrors. "I wish I knew how much square footage we own in glass," LeRoy says, laughing.

How much did it all cost? "$10 million is the number I always heard," says LeRoy. Which was an astonishing amount of money to spend on a restaurant thirty years ago. But the times have caught up with that expenditure: As one of Tavern's senior managers remarks, a million dollars doesn't go very far here now. "When it snows," says LeRoy, "it costs us $150,000 just to fix the roof." -- Lauren Johnston and Linda Perney