Insatiable (35 page)

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L
E
C
IRQUE
: H
AVING
M
Y
C
AKE AND
E
ATING IT
, T
OO

S
TAR CROWNED CHEFS COME AND GO BUT LE CIRQUE’S MENAGERIE STILL
swings from the rafters, jostling for position,” I wrote in the late winter of 1987. It was a time when Sirio Maccioni’s closely crowded tables turned three times at lunch, the ultrachic Europeans arriving tousled from bed at 2:30
PM
, even 3:00. Oh how Sirio relished his role as the table juggler, the courtly hand smoocher, the ego massager to generations of the high and the flighty. He feigned humility and affected pain as he flaunted the reservation book for lunch to me one day. “Look. Look,” he said, as if scarcely able to bear the torture. “VIP” it said next to a famous name. “Very VIP.” “Very VIP.” The lineup was one man’s Red Alert. He studied the blizzard of gleaming white tablecloths, adjusting the seating plan. He would put Governor Hugh Carey’s eight at that VIP table. Jerome Zipkin, First Lady Nancy Reagan’s walker, could have President Nixon’s usual corner post, across the way from Bendel’s Gerry Stutz. That left a conspicuous side by side on the coveted banquette for sable-swathed Ann Getty and her publishing partner, Lord Weidenfeld. Oh such rarefied bodies affirming the status of his banquettes. There were often times when someone congenitally unrefusable arrived, and then hyperventilating waiters would wrestle a table into the breezy few spare inches that permitted entrance at the front door. Sirio seemed quite pleased with himself, I thought.

That this impoverished orphan farm boy from Tuscany would be passing Parmesan toast to the ex-president. That so many swells had come to consider Le Cirque their own private canteen. That Sirio, freshly arrived in 1956 as an accomplished captain from transatlantic steamship luxury—scorned and rejected as Italian by the New York haughty French feeding establishment—now ruled the podium of the hottest French restaurant in town. These were the consummate cavalier’s golden days.

He charm was so slick, that dimpled smile so quick, it was impossible to imagine the anger inside. Years later, when we became confidants, Sirio began spinning tales of the rocky road that had led him to East Sixty-fifth Street. Fresh out of Tuscan hotel school, he had won a coveted apprentice spot at the Plaza Athénée in Paris. When it became clear he didn’t speak French, he was kicked out, penniless, not to return till he spoke French. He looked up the one person he knew from home in Paris, Ivo Levi, known then as Yves Montand. The dashing actor got Sirio a job in the chorus line of the Follies Bergères, where the nudity of the showgirls left Sirio perpetually aroused, and he was subsequently fired. It wasn’t till I read his autobiography
*
that I felt the full force of the rage that he still carries: the early death of his mother, his father killed by the retreating Nazis, his grandmother sending him off to hotel school in his father’s shoes painted black, the poor country bumpkin his classmates laughed at and girls would not date, the doors closed to Italians.

I’d loved being nobody, unnoticed, at the Colony at the dawning of
New York.
There, Sirio quickly learned who was who in the discreet, nonchattering upper crust. Maccioni apparently thought my critique of the Colony in 1969 unnecessarily cruel because it mentioned shutting down part of the pastry room because of rats in the cellar. He was an obsesser. He never forgave me for mentioning the rats. In the oblige of his new noblesse, he insisted he was amused at my take on Le Cirque as “soup kitchen for the anguished orphans of the late Colony,” though I ranked it thirteenth in my 1975 ratings of the best French restaurants. It didn’t make sense to complain anymore about my stingy praise, he decided. He relished his spot as a power player in the pages of our magazine.

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.