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Sirio Maccioni, Restaurant Ringmaster at Le Cirque, Dies at 88

Sirio Maccioni, Restaurant Ringmaster at Le Cirque, Dies at 88

(Bloomberg) -- Sirio Maccioni, the Tuscan-born leading man of the New York City dining scene whose Le Cirque restaurant drew a celebrity clientele and star chefs for more than 40 years, has died. He was 88.

He died Monday in Montecatini, in Tuscany, Italy, according to the New York Times, citing his son Mauro who confirmed the death through a family friend.

Sirio Maccioni, Restaurant Ringmaster at Le Cirque, Dies at 88

As owner and maitre d’, Maccioni was the dapper ringmaster of Le Cirque, French for “the circus,” arranging tables for a who’s-who of regulars including Nancy Reagan and Richard Nixon, Bill Cosby and Frank Sinatra, Julia Child and Beverly Sills. He could greet diners in German, French, Italian and Spanish, as well as his accented English, and enforced one of New York City’s most durable jackets-required dress codes.

With a roster of chefs that included Daniel Boulud and Geoffrey Zakarian, he drew from French and Italian culinary traditions to create food for American tastes. His goal, he said in his memoir, “Sirio: The Story of My Life and Le Cirque,” was not necessarily to be “the best restaurant,” but “the restaurant where everybody wants to go.”

“American chefs would not exist without Sirio,” chef Alain Ducasse said in Maccioni’s book, which was co-written by Peter Elliot of Bloomberg News. “Why? Because the food of today is the food of the customer first and the food of a country second. Sirio was the first person to do that.”

High Society

Maccioni learned the hospitality industry first in postwar Italy, then by waiting tables at top restaurants in Europe, before arriving in Manhattan in 1956. The lessons he learned about high society and haute cuisine culminated in the opening in 1974 of Le Cirque, what many considered the most famous restaurant in New York, at the Mayfair Hotel.

Its second incarnation, from 1997 to 2004, was as Le Cirque 2000, at the New York Palace Hotel. In 2006, Le Cirque opened on East 58th Street, in the building that serves as headquarters of Bloomberg LP, parent of Bloomberg News.

Le Cirque achieved a four-star review from the New York Times in 1987, renewed in 1997. The Times gave it two stars in 2006, three stars in 2008. When the Times downgraded the restaurant to a single star in 2012, Maccioni started looking for a new chef. In March 2017, the restaurant filed for bankruptcy amid high operating costs and the proliferation of high-end restaurants in Soho, Tribeca and other downtown neighborhoods in Manhattan.

What first turned Le Cirque into a “national media phenomenon,” according to Elliot, was its pasta primavera, “a dish of spaghetti, cream sauce and fresh vegetables” that “suddenly became the paradigm of the new age of cooking.” Writing in the New York Times in 1977, Craig Claiborne and Pierre Franey called the French-Italian hybrid “by far the most talked-about dish in Manhattan.”

Creme Brulee

Maccioni also was credited, through his hiring of pastry chef Dieter Schorner, with reinvigorating the dessert course, particularly with Le Cirque’s creme brulee.

With his wife, Egidiana, and their three sons, Mario, Marco and Mauro, Maccioni built on Le Cirque’s success by opening Sirio Ristorante, now shuttered, and Osteria del Circo, which the family closed in late 2017 due a dispute with the landlord but hoped to reopen at another location, according to a New York Times story. The family also closed Le Cirque in Manhattan and hoped to relocate.

Le Cirque had branches in Las Vegas, Dubai and India, according to its website.

The James Beard Foundation gave Maccioni its Lifetime Achievement Award in 2014.

Maccioni was born April 6, 1932, near Montecatini Terme, about 30 miles (50 kilometers) from Florence. A sister, Clara, followed two years later. Their father was Eugenio Maccioni, who worked at the region’s hotels, and their mother was the former Silvia Lenzi.

Resistance Fighter

Writing of his mother’s 1938 death from pneumonia, Maccioni blamed the “pride, ignorance and poverty” that made her insist on being treated at home rather than in a hospital. In 1944, as German troops battled anti-Nazi resistance fighters at the end of World War II, his father was killed.

Maccioni went to work cleaning up the town’s hotels to help prepare for the rebirth of the tourism industry, then entered a hotel-restaurant school.

“This was maybe my terrible handicap in life, that I had promised my grandmother and my sister, and mostly myself, that I was going to be good,” he said, according to a 1995 profile in Wine Spectator magazine.

At 17, he left home for France, working first at the Plaza Athenee and Maxim’s in Paris, and later at hotels in Zurich and Hamburg. A job aboard a luxury cruise ship brought him to New York City, where he stayed.

Feeding Bankers

He worked at Delmonico’s, the landmark steakhouse a few blocks from the New York Stock Exchange, before returning to Tuscany to acquire a green card. There, he reunited with a schoolmate, Egidiana Palmieri, whom he wed in 1964.

Back in New York City, he made a name for himself in 1961 as maitre d’hotel at the Colony, which was “the clubhouse of society’s mandarins,” according to Vanity Fair.

“His skill at getting from the kitchen to the table and at negotiating the dining room -- pouring, plating, cutting, presenting, and answering the phone -- was as solid and etched in his physical body as a dancer,” Elliot wrote. “The comparison to a dancer would stick with him the rest of his career. He oozed not just a Tuscan charm, but his own style of flirtation. Cafe society was mesmerized.”

Following two years at the Pierre Hotel’s La Foret supper club, he opened Le Cirque with Jean Vergnes, the French chef who had run the kitchen at the Colony. Vergnes died in 2010.

Of the name Le Cirque, Maccioni wrote: “I wanted a place to eat good food, but with the feeling of the circus, not the church. I like the church but I don’t want to eat there.”

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