Sirio: The Story of My Life and Le Cirque

Product Description

Sirio Maccioni is a living legend, a restaurateur extraordinaire who has wined and dined high society in New York for nearly half a century. Along the way, he helped launch the careers of many illustrious chefs – David Bouley, Daniel Boulud, and Jacques Torres among them – and befriended a host of celebrities in the arts, politics, and business, from Frank Sinatra and Frank Zappa to Nancy Reagan and Ivana Trump. Now Maccioni lets us into his world, revealing the secrets that have made his Le Cirque one of the world’s most celebrated restaurants.
With the help of award-winning Bloomberg restaurant critic Peter Elliot, Maccioni recounts the story of his life and his restaurant career. Beginning with his childhood in rural Tuscany during World War II and the tragedies and privations that left him determined to pursue success at the world’s finest restaurants, he shares a journey that took him to post-war Paris and Hamburg and the nightlife of pre-Castro Cuba and finally to New York.
By 1961, the dashing young Maccioni had become maitre d’ at New York’s most storied restaurant, the Colony. Within thirteen years, he had the experience and contacts he needed to launch his own restaurant, Le Cirque, which quickly became the hub of cafe society in New York.
From hiring the right chefs and revolutionizing the way top restaurants operate to popularizing now-famous dishes such as pasta primavera and creme brulee, Maccioni reveals how he made Le Cirque such a long-running success – a success that reached new heights when the restaurant moved to a new location in 1997. Along the way, Maccioni explains how he’s dealt with defecting chefs and demanding customers. And through it all, he pays tribute to his proud Tuscan roots and to his wife and their three sons, who operate the family’s other New York restaurant, Osteria del Circo, as well as restaurants in Las Vegas and Mexico City.
Like Maccioni himself, Sirio is full of passion, energy, and life – the unforgettable story of the world’s most extraordinary restaurateur.

From Publishers Weekly

New York’s social history can often be traced through its restaurants. The robber barons adored Delmonico’s, 1950s media darlings fancied the 21 Club and the 1980s’ power elite loved Le Cirque and its dazzling owner, Sirio Maccioni. Maccioni learned his trade in the hotels and restaurants of Europe and New York. By the early 1970s, the dashing Italian was ready to launch his own culinary experiment, and for more than 20 years, Le Cirque on East 65th Street epitomized near-reckless luxury. At first, Le Cirque was known more for the exclusivity of its customers, a blue-ribbon gaggle of celebrities and politicians (many of them, from Nancy Reagan to Frank Zappa, befriending Maccioni) than for the food. But Maccioni’s aggressive spending and the free rein he gave his chefs soon resulted in a dining revolution. The restaurant served as the training ground for chefs like Daniel Boulud, and it claims to have invented Pasta Primavera. Maccioni’s memoir is mostly a stream of reminiscences, with a dash of loving quotes from celebrities. It’s a doting portrait of, in the words of Ruth Reichl, “the most important restaurateur of the era.”
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Review

Sirio Maccioni has lived his life on the periphery of celebrity photographs. As maitre d’ and owner of Le Cirque, the New York restaurant where Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger reconciled, Frank Sinatra parked his limo and the “ladies who lunch” lunched, he has served for three decades as something of a mealtime matador to high society.
His memoir might have been a shallow name-dropper, full of chat about the Kennedy clan and insights into caviar. But that’s the last thing “Sirio” is. Indeed, from the first chapter’s anecdote of Ronald Reagan tossing off an ethnic joke, the book signals that it’s no gladhanding salute to famous people or monied swells.