Le Cirque of the Stars

By Patricia Dailey, Editor-in-Chief -- Restaurants & Institutions, 8/1/2004

If the entire world can be seen in a grain of sand, as poet William Blake suggested, then nearly everything that matters of hospitality is plainly on view in Sirio Maccioni, the iconic, courtly and unnervingly charismatic proprietor of New York City’s Le Cirque. Anyone who works in foodservice and endows their efforts with determination to excel would be wise to look closely at Maccioni and study his style, if not in person, then by making “Sirio: The Story of My Life and Le Cirque” (Wiley, 2004), written by Maccioni with Peter J. Elliot, their late-summer beach read.

In Manhattan’s puffed-up spheres of power, everyone knows or wants to know Maccioni. Doyennes, scions, moguls and jet setters shower “this imperial arbiter of international society” with air kisses and accolades. He responds by granting a table at Le Cirque, since 1974 his much-heralded hub of haute cuisine.

Beyond New York City, Maccioni isn’t nearly as recognized or well known as Emeril and Wolfgang—big names who have parlayed cooking skills and personas into modern-day business enterprises. He is instead quaintly, staunchly, charmingly Old World, turning warmth and graciousness into high art as effortlessly as most people breathe and sleep. What he does and embodies so effectively—the easy gestures of hospitality, the menu pioneering and the unerring certainty that a career in restaurants can be quite noble— should become the purview of anyone who genuinely wants to succeed—at any level—in foodservice.

Those who snag a table at Le Cirque (technically Le Cirque 2000 since 1997 when it reopened in the New York Palace Hotel, although no one calls it that) know intuitively and completely that they will be well fed, exquisitely served and treated like kings, whether they actually are royalty or merely are in from New Jersey for dinner.

What they may not know is the impact Maccioni has had on restaurateurs—how they see themselves and are seen by guests. Described by one reviewer as “part Fred Astaire, part Escoffier, part L.B.J.,” Maccioni was perhaps the first to recognize that food certainly matters but that whatever came out of the kitchen would shine most brightly in the glow of a glittering scene. In other words, he crafted the modern-age power restaurant, a social magnet of breathless buzz and energy, seeding a future in which restaurants became scenes and dining in them an event.

For the Tuscan-born Maccioni, though, the menu ultimately had to match the sophistication of the restaurant’s parade of guests, so he drew into his kitchen a stunning collection of talent, with Alain Sailhac, Daniel Boulud, Jacques Torres and David Bouley among the luminaries.

At one point in the book, when Maccioni had hired his first “star” chef, he writes simply, “People, food, energy.” Those three forces best capture what has caused Le Cirque to land in its own constellation. Maccioni, of course, drives them all; if a reader can pluck even the smallest detail from his career biography, the results would shine brightly.