Insatiable (36 page)

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

A
ND TO
T
HINK
T
HAT
I S
AW IT ON
W
OOSTER
S
TREET

I
T 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.”

Even the serving crew was beautiful. Young women from exotic cultures in garments that fit like wet suits. Our waiter, who looked like James Dean and was young enough to say, “James who?” offering club soda after bathing my sleeve in beurre blanc. Everyone was smiling and pretending not to stare.

So why did Brian look so sad? “This isn’t what I wanted,” he lamented. “I wanted a quiet, mellow, serious restaurant with good food. This is horrifying. Horrifying. I’ll never open another restaurant.” He gazed across the room, spying Ron Darling. “Now that’s impressive.” He smiled and left to greet the Mets ace pitching star.

And oh yes, Bianca was there.

The hole in the ozone was growing. Alaska sued Exxon and a few other oil firms for the massive March spill. Hungary allowed sixty thousand East Germans into Austria to seek freedom. “Why They Kill to Get into 150 Wooster” was the news flash from Manhattan.

All day, the phone lights would flash at the SoHo hot spot. The reservationist would listen to the outpourings of emotion, jotting notes but making no commitments. The struggle to be in the right place before Calvin and Bianca moved seemed a never-ending one. No table would get leased for the evening until Brian McNally came in midafternoon, studied the candidates, and designed the room for the evening. “Look who we didn’t accommodate yesterday because I had to be away at a wedding,” he said, brooding. “Paul Simon. Bret Easton Ellis. Jay McInerney.” Dear me, I thought. Mercury. Apollo. Pan.

Never mind cops narrowing the street to guard the Italian foreign minister. Never mind financier Al Taubman introducing his daughter to designer Mary McFadden (chalk pale, all in black) beside her new baby cupcake husband. Never mind the scattering of Gwathmeys, filmmaker Joan Micklin Silver, Ian Schrager with his niece and Steve Rubell’s nephew, plus the usual art-world suspects, the assorted Lady Gotrocks. “The evening was lost as far as I was concerned,” McNally told me.

Friday night. There was art darling Mary Boone, tanned and wearing white. Behind me, I heard
Time
’s art guru Robert Hughes explaining the house’s barley dish: “It’s halfway between a risotto and a couscous.”

“But that’s impossible,” Brian was saying into the phone. “Your secretary couldn’t have reserved two weeks ago, because we never book more than three days in advance.” He studied the Saturday-night lineup: Zubin Mehta, Charlie Sheen, Rusty Staub. “Rusty Staub?” he said, startled to see the Mets player among such predictables as actor Griffin Dunne and his fiancée, Carey Lowell. “It says here, ‘the new Bond girl,’ he snorted, “in case I didn’t know.” There were the inevitables of the era: Prince Michael of Greece, art dealer Tony Shafrazi with a party of twenty. McNally granted investor Stephen Swid his requested table for seven. “What shall I do about John Clavini?” he mused. “He’s so nice. He’s just a real nice guy, another one of those you have to resent because he comes with such wonderful girls. Tell him yes,” he instructed the reservationist, then turned to me and said, “Don’t think we just book by whim.”

Whim, savvy, loyalty, witchcraft, hormones. “Brian’s heaven is a room criss-crossed by dazzling women, long-haired wraiths in clingy bits of cloth, saucy, pouty, buds of ancient civilizations,” I wrote. From afar, or even close-up, you could say Brian McNally had rubbed a few sticks together, scattered a few tiles, planted a palm tree, and for now he had the hottest destination in town. “I caw’t think wot to caw it,” he said in his down-London way. “We’ll name it later.”

It had been a quiet week—Jewish holidays, a Rolling Stones concert—but the place did fine. There was sudden intake of breath and silence at the entrance of the tabloid’s toy of the moment, onetime Miss American Bess Myerson, six feet in heels. The
Times
’s Abe Rosenthal, his wife, novelist Shirley Lord, and the Arthur Gelbs (he being Abe’s right hand, they the biographers of Eugene O’Neill) in the power booth on the right looked stunned and rose to a greeting. And then in the late show, A&M Records cofounder Jerry Moss and Jellybean Benitez; Diane Von Furstenberg; a contingent from the hot retailer Barneys; boss Gene Pressman with his house restaurateur, Pino Luongo. Between flicks: Brian De Palma, Bob Rafelson (
Five Easy Pieces
), Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer (
Flashdance, Top Gun
), the L.A. inseparables, David Geffen, Barry Diller, Sandy Gallin. Michael Douglas, off the plane from Japan, checked in at 150. Everyone’s eyes were blinking as if in a supermarket-induced trance. Heads swiveled out of control. Model Beverly Johnson was just one flash of beauty you might recognize from
Vogue.
Tom and Meredith Brokaw. Carl Bernstein working the room. The department store zillionaires from San Francisco, Prentis and Denise Hale. Calvin and Kelly with filmmaker Howard Rosenman. A swirl of orange as Bianca was embraced. At our table, we sat tingling and giggling while our butter sauce congealed.

“That’s Prince Michael of Greece in a booth with five women,” I told my friends, who did not track dynasties that came before
Dynasty.
“Actually, one of those women is a man.”

My friend corrected me. “Two of those women are men.”

Well, of course Brian was wowed. That’s one of his charms. And he could be as starstruck as anyone, making sure I heard about the night he had Robin Williams, Bruce Willis, Paul Simon, and Steve Martin at one station, with Madonna across the room. Or the time Robert De Niro was in the first right-hand booth, Isabella Rossellini at the adjoining post, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver in the left-corner booth, and Claudia Cohen with Ronald Perelman and Carolina Herrera front and center. Or the night there was a communal intake of breath and utter silence . . . for Elizabeth Taylor. And the vroom outside that had the girls squealing, expecting a certain notorious cycling Don Juan, and in walked Malcolm Forbes in a gleaming white motorcycle helmet, unzipping leather to reveal the pinstripes underneath.

“People used to drink and drug,” pointed out my pal Hal Rubenstein, restaurant critic of the hipper-than-thou
Details
and editor-to-be of Malcolm Forbes’s ill-fated
Egg
magazine. “Now they’re sober and sane. Their septums have been fixed. They go to their AA meetings and they want to go out to eat. It’s a slightly different crowd here, older, more sure of themselves. At Canal Bar, they table-hopped. Here, they walk. And we’re all such media junkies. We hate to miss anything.”

Anthony Haden-Guest, nightlife hipster and my colleague at
New York,
introduced his date: a born-yesterday beauty with a skimpily bandeaued shelf above an expanse of perfect midriff. “Lisa Gaye stars in
Toxic Avenger 2
and
Toxic Avenger 3,
but that’s not why I brought her here,” he told Brian.

“It’s about a monster evolved from garbage,” said Lisa, lending me her glasses so I could case the room again. The crowd was giving way to late-late look-alikes. That’s either Nell Campbell’s sister or Anna Wintour’s cousin, we decided, focusing on a red Dutch-bob helmet of hair.

Haden-Guest was expanding as a British observer on the appeal of 150 Wooster’s unfinished state. “Americans reject perfection. They like things unfinished. All those fancy done-up postmodern restaurants closed because they were too finished. You felt like an extra. Here, you feel you’re part of the action. That’s why people prefer the sketch to the painting.”

“Do you think that’s why men prefer young girls?” I asked.

Anthony clutched Lisa Gaye’s hand. “Perhaps. Perhaps.”

Brian stopped by again. He had the distinct advantage of not being remarkably tall. He didn’t have to lean so far, double over, or crouch as he cruised the room, chatting up friends, poking fun, laughing, deliciously amused, happy. “I just came from a table where everyone was talking Yiddish,” he marveled.

“You know what they say,” muttered Haden-Guest. “Talk British. Think Yiddish. A Brian place is like an Eagles song,” said Haden-Guest, babbling on. “Brand-new, it sounds like a standard.”

“You’re so lyrical,” cried Brian. “You should be a writer. You should stop typing and start writing.”

I returned a week later. Just days from his fortieth birthday, McNally seemed ambivalent, a bit weary, I thought. Though he often gazed around the brightish (for best visibility) unfinished room and marveled to see every seat taken by someone he knew. “’Tiz sort of amaaaazing. It’s a lot of fawning,” he told me. “Lots of groveling. Lots of pulling on the forelock. I’m buying the time to do nothing one day.”

Alas, McNally’s backers at Canal Bar took one look at the 150 Wooster revelers and sued him for luring their crowd to SoHo. One day we arrived and found the door padlocked. It was a slam to the excess and the delicious superficiality of the eighties. Given fifteen minutes of fame, 150 Wooster rode the wave for less than five. Brian never had a comeback to equal it. Brother Keith would be the McNally with a genius for the nineties.