Sirio Maccioni’s fabled Le Cirque at 151 E. 58th St. will soon join Ringling Bros. in the circus graveyard. “The Greatest Show on Earth” couldn’t survive suddenly losing its elephants, but Le Cirque’s party animals have been jumping ship for a long time.
The last meal will “more than likely” be served Dec. 31, Sirio’s son Mauro told The New York Times, but it might not be the final call. Maccioni and his sons teased that they might open a new, smaller, fourth edition of Le Cirque somewhere else next year. Let’s hope so. But it can only be a faint shadow of the restaurant that once lit up the town like no other before or since.
A longtime customer, Jean Shafiroff, was to announce a plan aimed at “saving” Le Cirque Wednesday afternoon at a press conference outside the restaurant.
The original Le Cirque in the Mayfair Regent Hotel on East 65th Street was the vision of Tuscan-born Maccioni, who brought European elan to a city struggling to recover after nearly going broke in the mid-’70s. It reigned as the throne room of the city’s culinary-cultural nexus from 1974-1997 but made its biggest splash during Ronald Reagan’s presidency — a New York era satirized in “Bonfire of the Vanities,” but also a time of renewed optimism after Watergate, the Vietnam War and the gloomy Jimmy Carter years.
Le Cirque was the city’s premier showplace for the era’s excess and glamour. It was more fun than the stodgy ‘21’ Club or power-lunch mecca The Four Seasons. Its cuisine — “French with some [Italian] basil on top,” Sirio’s son Marco put it — blew away French old-guard spots. Le Cirque launched great chefs including Daniel Boulud, David Bouley and Jacques Torres. It was where much-copied classics such as spaghetti primavera and black sea bass wrapped in a crisp potato crust were first served. But the spaghetti was a secret dish never printed on the menu — either you knew to ask for it or you didn’t.
The center ring was reserved for an eye-popping constellation of movers, shakers and celebrities whom charismatic Maccioni wrangled like a real circus ringmaster. Scenes from “Wall Street” and “First Wives Club” were shot there. The star power was so strong that a “Mad Men” episode” mentioned it, even though the show was set six years before the place opened. You can’t blame the writers — nothing like Le Cirque existed in 1968.
Murals of monkeys dressed as 18th century aristocrats greeted a parade of Hollywood stars, Wall Street wheeler-dealers and stunning models. Paparazzi camped out on the sidewalk at Park Avenue and 65th Street to catch the arrivals of President Ronald Reagan and wife Nancy, Frank Sinatra, Donald Trump with wives Ivana and Marla Maples, Barbara Walters, former Page Six editor Claudia Cohen and her future husband, financier Ronald Perelman — who liked his flounder “burnt to perfection,” Boulud recalled.
Frank Zappa showed up for the first time in an Armani suit over a T-shirt and no tie. Marco Maccioni seated him only after giving him a house tie to put on. After the rocker flipped for what he called “the best lobster in the world,” he came again and again in the same tie.
Sinatra was handed a sheet of paper after every meal. He wrote “yes” or “no” to indicate whether he liked it. Henry Kissinger pretended not to love dessert. “So we would hide him a crème brûlée behind the bar . . . he’d take a trip to the bathroom and eat some pieces of the creme brûlée on his way back,” Sirio recalled.
If socialites Pat Buckley, Nan Kempner and Betsy Bloomingdale were the dining room’s queens, its untitled king was Jackie Onassis escort Jerry Zipkin, who’d arrive with a procession of princesses and titled ladies on his arm. Asked by Sirio if he needed anything, Zipkin responded, “Remove that lady over there, she’s too loud,” Bob Collacello related in Vanity Fair.
Pastry chef Torres made a chocolate cake for Pope John Paul II, crowned with a Vatican-shaped dome of white chocolate which the delighted pontiff peeled off with a finger.
Maccioni knew powerful heads of state by the size of their security entourages. Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza came with a dozen, but Reagan “had only two,” Sirio wrote in his 2004 memoir.
It was another story for the unrecognized. Times critic Ruth Reichl in 1993 wrote that visits when she wasn’t identified included a maitre d’ unpleasantly hissing, “Do you have a reservation?” But when she was spotted, Sirio swept her to a table even though, he said, “The king of Spain is waiting at the bar.”
Maccioni moved Le Cirque to a larger home in the New York Palace Hotel’s landmarked Villard House in 1997 — oddly renamed Le Cirque 2000. Sirio offered pre-scandal Bill Cosby, grieving over his murdered son, Ennis, a table in the kitchen days before the place served its first public meal. Cosby himself cooked penne for his wife and daughter. “He likes it a little spicy,” Sirio said of his taste.
On opening night, Trump and Maples — acting cozy despite talk of a marital rift — oohed with other boldfaces over designer Adam Tihany’s over-the-top fantasy. Guests entered through a gaudily lit, high-ceilinged bar. A clock whizzed along an oval neon-lit track that ran through the ornate space. Two plush dining rooms featured pre-Raphaelite romantic murals and lighting so bold that customers snickered that it reminded them of McDonald’s.
Architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable cackled at “hokey shapes, patterns and strident colors, one-armed chairs and winged settees with Martian lights.” Purple chairs were so high, they had to be cut down after regulars griped they couldn’t see boldfaced neighbors.
But things later took a dark turn even before 9/11 wrecked the high-end dining scene. The taste for French cuisine was ebbing. Le Cirque was so uptown-oriented that Sirio once referred to the Palace location at Madison Avenue between East 49th and 50th streets as “downtown.” But the city’s wealthiest people no longer all lived north of 57th Street. The dining center of gravity was shifting south, as epitomized by new Balthazar in Soho in 1997.
The food could still be wonderful. Maccioni spent $3 million to build a kitchen for Cambodian-born chef Sottha Khunn. But after Khunn left in 2002, I wrote that potato-wrapped sea bass “has worn thinner than some of the social X-rays who still turn up for lunch.”
Fed up with costly union rules, Sirio announced he’d shut down at the end of 2004 and move. Le Cirque No. 3 launched in 2006 in an undulating, glass-wrapped space in the Bloomberg building’s One Beacon Court arcade. Celeb regulars, such as Paris Hilton, Barbara Walters and Nancy Shevell clustered in the prime area near the entrance, while tourists went to Siberia behind a tall “monkey pole.”
The space included a huge, awkward lounge, and the Maccionis threw the kitchen sink into making it work. It drew private events like Howard Stern’s and Beth Ostrosky’s wedding but despite repeated changes to its menus and music, the lounge often fell to tacky uses like showing the Joe Biden-Sarah Palin insult-fest debate in 2008.
Chefs came and went. My last, mediocre meal in March came right after Le Cirque had hired Tom Valenti of Ouest fame. “We are excited,” Maccioni told Page Six. One week later, Le Cirque and sister Italian restaurant Circo filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Valenti left and the kitchen’s since been adrift.
Maccioni blames “high rent” for closing, but real-estate sources say it has a reasonably priced lease with years to go.
In fact, he’s long wanted out of Beacon Court. He told me in 2010 that the space was “too big” and he’d prefer “something like 60 to 80 seats [at a different address] like the original.”
Le Cirque-watchers believed it would never close because the Maccionis needed a Manhattan flagship to lend lustre to satellite eateries around the world, from Las Vegas to Bangalore. Its New York legacy is too precious to end now. Let’s hope Sirio and sons will raise the Big Top one more time, even if it doesn’t stand quite as tall as before.