by Gael Greene
Once I could no longer remain anonymous, Sirio simply set out to seduce me as he tried to seduce all journalists (as he felt he had seduced Craig Claiborne) with his free-flowing ooze of charm—the irresistible blizzards of white truffle that would fall onto the risotto, the pasta primavera that was not on the menu but appeared as if by magic, the dance of unordered sweets. I called it “doing the Sirio.”
It was not about sex, although, dimpled and lean at fifty in his thousand-dollar custom-made Italian suits, Sirio was a looker. There were beauties who offered, pressing telephone numbers into his hand. “If only I had the time,” he would moan. All restaurateurs have that break between three and six o’clock, time for a nap, time to skip a nap. But no, there was not even a whisper of gossip about Sirio.
I even fell for the outrageous concept that I, in my no-name line-blocker shoulder pads off the final, final sale rack at Bendel’s, had an unassailable claim to a “Very VIP” banquette west of Barbara Walters and east of Liz Smith. Did I resist? Of course not. Though I always warned anonymous readers they might wither and waste away in the gulag behind the bar, where Sirio, caught in the gravity pull of his pets, rarely wandered. “Le Cirque without Sirio hovering is not Le Cirque at all,” I wrote.
One day, my guest and I were nibbling, savoring, oohing and aahing, trembling in response to a fusillade of enticements from the new chef, Daniel Boulud, a name that meant nothing then. I couldn’t help noticing that while we were sharing a daunting feast, most everyone else was simply having lunch. I spied an omelette across the room and a chef’s salad not far away. I surveyed the regulars, the bouffant blondes, small women with large jewels, and svelte beauties who made a career of marrying better each time. Well, too bad, I thought. Let them eat sole.
There were flaws in the early Boulud kitchen (my critical faculties were never truly blinded by Sirio’s fawning). But a melting flan of porcini and foie gras beside lobster in a spinach nest made me shiver. And I was enraptured by what would become Boulud classics: the barely cooked rouget wrapped in bands of crisped potato on a butter-slicked red wine sauce, and the layering of scallop slices with rounds of black truffle in heady truffle butter. (Boulud has disarmingly shared the credit for both with Sottha Khunn, the alter ego he’d brought along with him to Le Cirque from the kitchen of Le Régence at the Plaza Athénée.)
Every fall after his annual holiday in Italy, Sirio would return to Le Cirque with boxes of the first white truffles and, every year, another Italian notion. As his confidence grew, Sirio began diluting Le Cirque’s French cast with the food of his own Italian reveries: ravioli, risotto, the Parmesan toast, focaccia, crostini al lardo, sheer white pig fat—“less cholesterol than butter,” he assured me. Sirio was worried that the Lyon-born Boulud would not be up to the house’s traditional Thursday lunch masterwork—the bollito misto—the classic boiled meats, Italian-style, with its aromatic boiled calf’s head, tongue, brains, brisket, and capon. It came with a constantly multipying platter of condiments: assorted salts, a trio of mustards, green sauce, red sauce, mostarda di frutta (candied fruit spiked with mustard). The solution was to alternate Sirio’s classic bollito with Daniel’s French boiled dinner, the pot-au-feu. Thursday was my favorite day for lunch.
Heads would turn. All eyes were riveted with shock, if not revulsion, to my right, where two captains were lowering a mammoth platter to a hastily planted service table beside me. I felt like Henry VIII in a room full of panicked anorexics. Happily, one or two small tidbits of filet, rib, haunch, foie, cabbage, turnip, parsnip, celery root, and carrot were quickly arranged clockwise on my plate and the platter was trundled off to tempt Henry Kissinger.
I thought that Sirio seemed almost happy in that golden era when Agnellis and Rothschilds got off the plane at JFK and rushed to Le Cirque, baggage and all, when Town & Country photographed Sirio’s best-dressed blondes all in a row on the front banquette, with the dashing host draped across their tables. Le Cirque was home base for visiting French chefs. Paul Bocuse, Roger Vergé, Gaston Lenôtre, and their camp followers would fill a big round for late lunch and then return for dinner. Le Cirque’s crème brûlée—its unique gossamer finish credited to a pastry sous-chef named Francesco Gutierrez—was already legendary. It would appear even on Paul Bocuse’s menu as crème brûlée Sirio. For me, the voluptuous bread and butter pudding was easily its equal. I was never forced to choose between them. Sirio always sent out both.
And then would come the silver compote of sugared-glacéd fruit, candied peel, coconut macaroons, tartlets with berries gleaming like jewels from Bulgari, and killer cookies. And chocolate truffles, of course, discreet in their own covered crystal box. Driven as always, Sirio had recently sprung for new $125 service plates. “The pastry chefs are insisting I must buy big plates for the dessert specials, every one a different color,” he confided, sighing like a man hopelessly in love with a profligate wife. “I think I will let them persuade me.”
One afternoon some years later, I let William Reilly, my big boss from Primedia, the new owner of New York, arrive before I did and found him sitting in purdah. It was a few minutes before Sirio dashed by and caught sight of me in his peripheral vision.
“Why are you sitting here?” he cried in alarm. “Let me move you to another table.”
I could feel Bill Reilly shift in his seat, ready to make the move. He was the new media power in town, and it would do nothing for his image to be seen in Siberia.
“But I like this table, Sirio,” I insisted. “Now I can see what it’s like to be nobody at Le Cirque.”
Sirio lowered his head in exasperation. “You know everyone is the same here,” he said. He always said that. I think he actually believed it.
As teenagers, Sirio’s sons began to appear. He loved showing them off. When they were children, his wife, Egi, would often take the three boys along for dinner at six o’clock so they could have a chance to see their father. Sirio began sending them out on the floor when they were about twelve. Marco, the sociable middle son, used to go up to Sirio and say, “Don’t you want me to bring the people champagne?” Later, Sirio shook his head, remembering. “It seems the people were giving him five-dollar tips. I never found out, or I would have killed him. Then I discovered the secret.”
As one son or another won compliments for finding prime tables for the demanding masters of the universe in the usually overbooked Le Cirque, Sirio Maccioni defended himself: “It’s not my fault they want to be in this business. I pushed them to be doctors, lawyers, architects, anything but this. Maybe I pushed too hard.” He would brood.
Egi Maccioni gave him credit. “Sirio, he didn’t push. We never encouraged them to take on this difficult life. Still, you know, they started to breathe this atmosphere when they were very little. We took them every summer all over to the restaurants of the great chefs. And you know Sirio, how he is. He has only one subject.”
The oldest, Mario, according to brother Marco, never went along with Sirio’s idea of saving the best tables for special friends. Mario would seat Kissinger in the far corner. “A table is a table,” he would say—a line guaranteed to ignite a tirade from Papa.
Marco was innocent and eager for initiation his first Saturday officially on the job at Le Cirque. He recalled that day: “My dad was eating a late lunch at the bar. Definitely you didn’t want to go near him then. He told me to answer the phone and tell everyone it was full, full, full. But people were so insistent. They wouldn’t take no. They insisted on talking to Sirio. I handed him the phone. He was furious. ‘You take care of it. I don’t care if it’s the president or the pope.’ Then I discovered he was testing me. . . . He had Felix the bookkeeper calling and asking for a reservation. One day, the president’s office did call, and I said, ‘No. We’re full.’ And my father grabbed the phone. ‘You idiot,’ he was shouting. ‘That is the president.’”
Marco had a nose for wines. Sirio instructed him, “When it’s a table of good people, people that you know, offer a good bottle
of wine.” One day, Sirio caught the youth giving away a three-thousand-dollar Petrus.
Marco defended himself: “But Papa, you told me to offer a good bottle of wine.”
My Aspen Mountain man, Steven, and I were spending the summer in Pietrasanta, less than an hour from Montecatini. It was 1995, the year Sirio spent trying to open Circo. “The little trattoria for my wife and sons,” he called it. Every summer, Maccioni would close for August and the family would retreat to Montecatini. There, they lived in what had been the mayor’s home, where Sirio, as a boy, would peer into the windows and marvel at the luxury.
Invited for dinner, we met the Maccionis in the market one afternoon, where Egi was buying a crate of bright yellow zucchini blossoms and fruit so ripe, you could smell the peaches a block away. In the early evening, Egi and Sirio’s sister began flouring and deep-frying a forest of zucchini flowers as their friend Franca, the gifted chef of Romano’s in nearby Viareggio, on her night off, seasoned a huge branzino. Sirio’s new assistant, Elizabeth Blau, and a young woman hired to cook at Circo had been invited for the week, the better to absorb the Tuscan spirit and reproduce it on West Fifty-fifth Street once Circo opened. As usual, Sirio was ranting about the abuses he suffered from Adam Tihany, the architect he loved to berate but wouldn’t put down a floor without.
We were to be fourteen at the table for dinner, but every few minutes the phone rang and Sirio invited someone else. The dining room table grew and grew, till finally it stretched into the kitchen, now set for twenty-three. I was adding flatware and glasses when Sirio came downstairs, flushed and triumphant.
“My son Marco. He is so smart,” he said proudly. “He sends a fax.” Sirio waved a sheet of paper. “There are so many VIPs at Le Cirque tonight that I must assign the tables and fax him back.” He sat down happily to solve the crucial geometry.
Sirio had fed the cardinal and the pope, presidents, and everyone else. No one thought to ask him, but how fitting that there he was at the top of the steps, breasting the crowd at St. Bartholomew’s Church on Park Avenue for the funeral of Malcolm Forbes, hissing sotto voce instructions to the ushers—who should sit where because, well, who else would know?
Sirio was deeply wounded when Daniel Boulud left to go off on his own at Café Boulud after almost six years. He was livid when I wrote “A Petit Pan,” criticizing Sylvain Portay, the Ducasse hand he’d imported to share the kitchen with Sottha Khunn after Daniel bowed out. A favorite of Sirio’s took me to dinner several months later. Sirio looked through me. Finally, he could stand it no more. He swerved toward our table. “We don’t need people like you,” he sputtered. Two courses later, the dessert seduction commenced.
He only stopped ranting about my ingratitude and betrayal to anyone too polite to beg off when, not long after, Ruth Reichl cleverly gave Le Cirque a double ranking: one star for unknowns, three stars for regulars. Now in his anguish and rage at Reichl, my complaints seemed almost forgivable.
I can’t recall ever seeing Sirio happy at Le Cirque 2000. When he didn’t like the renewal lease terms on Sixty-fifth Street, he let himself be courted by the sultan of Brunei’s brother at the Palace Hotel. They offered him the moon and he accepted. Perhaps he let himself bask in affection at the preview opening on his birthday, when his world paid court. And certainly his spirits must have soared the evening he knew that Sottha Khunn’s kitchen had won back its wandering fourth star from the Times. I could see he was thrilled the night of his book launch in 2004, with a meteor shower of stars and heavenly bodies gathered at the best book party ever. “It’s nothing special,” he insisted. “Just old friends.”
But he was bruised and astonished by the reaction to Le Cirque 2000. “Either we are a genius or we are completely crazy,” he liked to say. Did he think he owned Le Cirque 2000? I wrote. I guess he didn’t imagine we would take it so personally. “The Park Avenue blondes, waspish trust fund babies and Jewish American princesses, we gourmand priests and food-world flapsters, we jet-stream migrants and Euro transplants, we owned Le Cirque.” And we went into a tizzy the day Sirio threw open the doors.
“‘If I brought this chair home and said it was for my new restaurant, you’d say I was out of my mind,’ cried one regular, craning her neck from behind the tall, one armed velvet chair with its amusing clown buttons. ‘You can’t see who’s here.’
“‘It’s chaos, but it’s so early. Give them time,’ a loyalist countered. ‘The chairs will go. Sirio and his sons will saw them down themselves.’”
The majority of regulars seemed shocked at the neon and plastic contempo that architect Adam Tihany had installed in the landmark rooms. “It’s like putting a Ferrari in a palazzo,” Tihany kept insisting, as if that were a trick we’d all like credited in our obituary.
“How could they desecrate these beautiful historic rooms?” moaned an anguished and expensively preserved preservationist. “Neon and schmutz,” one fan summed it up after a $160 lunch. Alas, the million-dollar kitchen—Sottha’s dream—was forty-six seconds away from our table, on a flight path blocked by casual amblers and clustered arrivals at the maître d’s stand. No wonder the focaccia—too long out of the oven—was ossified in its slick of embalming oil. Without the familiar royal banquette up front, how could you know if you counted? No one was sure which room was Siberia. That could unsettle your tummy even before lunch.
Sure enough, by my sixth visit, they’d shrunk the chairs. Jacques Torres, the Fabergé of pâtissiers, was sending out his cunning chocolate stove, the cassis topiary, and a wintry tree made of chocolate, with branches nuzzling bonbons. Many of the ladies who munch chopped salade for lunch were claiming their tables. But it would soon be obvious that certain “Very, Very VIPs” had already fled for the kindergarten tables at Harry Cipriani’s.
Though Le Cirque and Circo at the Bellagio in Las Vegas, and celebrations rotated at great expense through party rooms upstairs at Le Cirque 2000, would make him rich, Sirio seemed restless and unfulfilled. His tirades against real and imagined injustices became legendary. He would move Le Cirque yet again. He would open another canteen for his sons at the new Bloomberg building. And they wanted him in Paris, he confided, warning not to tell a soul. The great chef André Soltner tried to persuade him to let go. Soltner, the workhorse patron of Lutèce, had surprised everyone by reveling in retirement after selling out to Michael Weinstein of publically held Ark. But he could not persuade Sirio to slow down.
This time, Sirio would show us all once again. There would be a reincarnation of Le Cirque, he insisted. The orphan farm boy who went off to the nearby hotel school wearing his dead father’s shoes walks in his own shoes now, and his moneyed pets—the faithful and the strayed—will follow him wherever he decides to venture next.
45
AND TO THINK THAT I SAW IT ON WOOSTER STREET
IT SEEMS TO ME IT’S ENDEARING—THOUGH SOME MIGHT THINK IT’S PITIFUL—that New Yorkers (both those to the manner born and those imported) are never quite sure they count until they get that table. Think of the street-smart peasants and derniers arrivistes we have wooed in our hunger and insecurity over the decades to get that table: Henri Soulé at Le Pavillon; his ex-cashier, Mme. Henriette at La Côte Basque; the impoverished orphan from a Tuscan farm, Sirio Maccioni; the neighborhood saloon keeper, Elaine Kaufman; the custom-shirt vender, Glenn Birnbaum at Mortimer’s. For a few thrill-racked fortnights in 1989, we looked for affirmation to Brian McNally, self-taught son of a stevedore from London’s South End. Grown-ups, powers who decide what news is fit to print, billionaires, princelings, proper little Junior Leaguers with their velvet headbands, we vie for that table. But then so many of us are street-smart, too, peasants and newly hatched rich. And for a short, happy moment in 1989, we were nourished by Brian’s nod to a reserved niche at 150 Wooster Street.
It had no name at all, just an address. A former body shop faintly aglow on a desolate strip of nighttime SoHo. Drive by and you’d think someone had left a light burning in a garage. Still, a
body shop, in its Brian body-worshiping way. And overnight. Boffo.
Yes, you needed a reservation. No, you couldn’t get one unless you were desperate enough to settle for a table at 6:30. You joined the meek at the bar, waiting to inherit, hoping someone would invite you to join their booth in the continuous house party, watching pals darting about the room, lobbing kisses and innuendo. The youthquake, the shock troops of fashion. Women with saucers on their heads. Men with pleated paper fans and green plastic bangles. Lots of Eurolings and South Americanos and Japanese, a Zen master, all his minions carrying cameras. Beauties with bared thighs, bared backs, bared shoulders. People you recognized at once, even though you didn’t know who they were. “And did you see? It’s Bianca.”
“If only we could bottle Brian McNally,” I gushed in my early review. “If only some Harvard MBA could reduce McNally’s seemingly improvisational fumblings to a formula. Dazed entrepreneurs of feeding, riding the equilibrium-defying roller coaster toward Chapter 11, would love to plump the secret of his knack. How he chooses the most remote outburb and makes it ‘in.’ How he spruces things up so subtly the room looks evolved or almost undone. That even the food counts. Do not forget that Patrick Clark came of age at the stove of Odeon. The Canal Bar’s Matthew Tivy is no slouch. And Ali Barker, who pleased folks at the Union Square Cafe despite a drift toward excess, has calmed down here.”
