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The following write-up, quoted at length, is from the New York Magazine. They recently published a yesteryear issue to celebrate the “Social History of the City Through Restaurants.” In 1986-88 I worked at Le Cirque, one of the restaurants remembered, on the fish station for evening service. I started at noon 6 days a week, and ended at 11:00 PM.
Below is the remembrance of Le Cirque from the New York Magazine:
Le Cirque in 1980s
Where Sirio Greeted Us Beautifully
By Julia Edelstein
Four Upper East Side grandes dames, who were regulars, reminisce.
Sirio Maccioni holding court at Le Cirque in 1981. Ivana Trump, Muffie Bancroft, Anne Arledge, Anna Moffo Sarnoff, and Cristina DeLorean are among the guests. Photo: Slim Aarons/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
You walked in …
Sharyn Mann, co-founder of the Food Allergy Initiative (now FARE): Sirio Maccioni would be at the door and sat everyone. He was just one of the most intelligent people. I wish he could have run for president! He knew everybody and seated everybody perfectly.
Barbara Tober, former editor-in-chief of Brides and longtime philanthropist affiliated with the Metropolitan Opera and Citymeals on Wheels: We were greeted beautifully.
Jamee Gregory, author of New York Parties: Private Views and past president of the Society of Memorial Sloan Kettering: You know, whenever you entered Sirio’s kingdom, he made you feel really, really special. And if he knew you, it was a place you could always call at the last minute and he would find a table for you. I think that’s one of the things all of the regulars really appreciated. He seated people like it was a chess game.
BT: There were the tables of prestige. Sirio knew who should get the top table of prestige and the second top table of prestige. He kind of knew who was an “I’m important and you’re not” person, and he put them in the best place possible. If he couldn’t find the best place, he’d apologize six ways to Sunday and put them in the next best place possible.
SM: Sirio had an eye. He picked people out. I don’t know what he was looking for, but he was brilliant.
Then subtly looked around …
JG: My friends and I would go there at least once a week. At lunch, Sirio held the tables on the banquette for people who came a lot. You would always see, say, ten pairs of women or men or whoever that you knew. And the ones you knew, you were glad you knew them. It felt like a club. It was not just random people. And then there would be the odd one you’d never seen before, like Richard Nixon.
SM: You would always have to drop your napkin and look both ways. Henry Kissinger would be sitting in the front. Or the conductor Zubin Mehta. You felt really good about yourself just being there.
BT: There was a corner where everybody would look right away to see who was sitting there. But I wasn’t looking around much. I was so in love with my husband.
Someone might call Nancy Reagan on the house phone …
KY: My recollection is that I ate lunch there several times a week, not always with the same women. We would chitchat. And, you know, if you were trying to finance a charity ball or you wanted someone to be an honoree, you would take them to Le Cirque because it was a glamorous place.
The food, the food …
BT: I remember always trying to lose weight. I don’t even think about it now. But in those days, because we ate out so much, I was always trying to figure out what was delicious but small.
KY: I didn’t eat very much — lots and lots of salad and grilled fish.
SM: The pasta primavera was the best in the city. That was the first time I ever had pine nuts that were roasted before they put them into the pasta. Oh, and there was the cheese soufflé.
JG: I remember going, and I won’t name names, but one person ordered three lettuce leaves in a salad. But they did have wonderful Italian food. My people weren’t so dietetic. We had the pasta primavera, and it’s pretty healthy because it had all the vegetables, right? It wasn’t like carbonara in cream sauce. When my mother-in-law, Lydia Gregory, was dying in 1979, Sirio heard that she was ill and he sent pasta primavera to her in the hospital. It was her favorite.
SM: And he did these amazing desserts. You didn’t just order an apple pie. When I had tables of ten or 15 women, he would bring out all these desserts, and each one was different. They had these desserts in the 1980s that weren’t so much about eating but about looking at them. There was one in the shape of a piano and another in the shape of a clown. Altogether, it was like a circus.
BT: The desserts always had something charming to decorate them. You would get your dessert, and Sirio would say, “Oh, look, isn’t that cute?”
So, what do you think? I didn’t work the lunch service but I remember the people who entered the front door as I entered the service door, and they were exactly what this article helps you envision; women in smart outfits who stepped out of a line of black cars. The scene in the kitchen as I ascended the steps from the locker room minutes later was always the same, like someone had lit the fuse and yelled “fire in the hole,” as we all waited for the inevitable. The cooks ran from the line with a look of “oh shit,” on their faces, racing for some forgotten ingredient or another.
The line. A row of stoves covered with a huge flat top of thick steel, heated to ungodly temperatures, a huge broiler, a fryer and a large grill, all roaring away. When you entered the line the heat was oppressive, overwhelming. We sweated like boxers in there. On the waiter’s side there was a large steam table, with heat lamps above, a small sink, and, right in the middle, a huge load bearing, steel girder covered with concrete and tile to remind you that a hotel was built above this basement kitchen.
Souffled potatoes is an old fashioned item where potatoes are sliced on a mandolin to perfect size and then fried while stirred. On the second frying, after freezing, the potato slices open up into crisp little potato tubes. It’s a thing that is absolutely not worth doing. There are better potato chips on the market. One night Woody Allen got into a little dustup with his waiter and before long he was there, on the line, learning how to make souffled potatoes. Sirio stood fifteen feet away from the heat, wearing a desperate little smile. Woody, in a brown wool jacket, shirt and tie, had a look on his face like he immediately regretted challenging the existence of a souffled potato - nothing was worth the heat plunge he’d taken. Our resident alcoholic David, whose station included the deep fryer, walked Woody through the whole deal with more explanation than any potato deserves. The rest of us watched and laughed.
Speaking of Woody, weird sex was also a menu item at Le Cirque, which is more a reflection of New York than the restaurant. There were well known stories of some chef I never met getting free fellatio curbside from a food critic. I did not witness this, thankfully. We would often have models of some renown who used the kitchen as a shortcut to the private party room. The whoops and hollers would follow, once she was out of earshot. “I bet she can take it in the ass, man,” the Chef said, his go to measurement of female fitness. Then there were the Dominicans washing the dishes who had a running joke about sex with a burrow, complete with pantomime, which I never fully understood, again thankfully.
Sirio came into the kitchen rarely, and he only came behind the line when we had suckling pig on the menu. Then, before service got going, he would walk into the line like Il Papio without saying a word, just tapping each cook as he went to let us know not to turn around in a hurry. He’d cut off pieces of the little pig, especially the crisp skin that had been basted with balsamic vinegar and honey. Each time he tried to turn and leave his appetite got the best of him and he’d stop to pinch another morsel. It was cute to see him like that, dressed to the nines and sneaking suckling pig like the Italian busboy he’d once been.
Seemed like each week some event took place that you cannot forget. The time David overcooked the King of Spain’s filet of beef and a war nearly broke out. There were regular fist fights, knife fights, screaming matches. The time Dudley Moore sent back two bottles of wine, each with a sticker over $750. The time Bill Cosby came in after closing with a group of twelve. David, already three sheets to the wind, needed me to tell him three times what he needed to cook. Finally I screamed it at him and Bill Cosby, hidden on the other side of the massive girder, imitated me: “oh fuuuucking A David, you need 3 fuuuuucking chickens,” in his inimitable style.
I must admit it was a little hurtful to read the remembrances of the grandes dames in the New York article. The only dish they remembered was the pasta primavera, actually spaghetti primavera, which, in all truth, was cooked by a waiter in the back station, or if the dining room wasn’t too crazy, right out there next Kissinger, Nixon, Faye Dunaway, Woody or Bill. Oh, the humanity!
But the New York article is honest, all too honest really. Food, though the restaurant reviewers to this day go on and on about the quality of the greens in a salad, the tenderness of a lamb chop, or the velvet toothsomeness of a sauce, is never important to the “not just random people” of New York’s upper crust (or anywhere else for that matter). Everything in their life is about status. If you’re a young chef you won’t understand that the food is just window dressing, because the high status do not want you to know that status is the coin of their realm. You might pinch some of it! But frankly, you probably won’t. As the ladies above attest, status is indescribable, but those who have it know it, and more importantly, they also know who doesn’t have it, which includes anyone who works in a kitchen.
We worked ourselves to the bone and earned the coveted 4th star from the New York Times that summer, but what of it? All they remembered was the spaghetti primavera made by a waiter! You pride yourself on the food you ‘create’ but the restaurant will live or die based on who walks in the door and whether you make them think they’re someone. Hire a good Maître d' and invite every local celebrity you can. Don’t treat everyone like a rock star though, that’s the death knell of a high end restaurant. Status is about hierarchy above all. Know the wealthy owners of businesses and treat them like they deserve top billing. Look at that 65 hour week and do what you can to make it 45 or even less. Save yourself the heartache of wasting your youth with overwrought, finicky food for people who only care about who else is there, and whether ‘they’ know who else is there.
After Sirio retired, his sons attempted to run the Le Cirque brand. They moved the restaurant out of the Upper East Side to a spot in Midtown Manhattan, with a thoroughly modern vibe in both the decor and the food. They even opened up a place in Las Vegas. They ran the brand, into the ground; Le Cirque New York no longer exists. The place in LV serves unrecognizable food at unimaginable prices. I’d rather eat spaghetti primavera.
I wrote previously about my experience in New York and a classic novella - Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s: