Remembering Restaurant Ringmaster Sirio Maccioni (1932-2020)

By anyone’s standard Sirio Maccioni, the Tuscan-born impresario best known for his New York restaurant Le Cirque, died last night at his home in Montecatini Terme, Italy, after a long period of failing health (unrelated to Covid-19), according to his son Mauro Maccioni.

         No American restaurateur was more  revered by his colleagues than Sirio—everyone called him by his first name—and few cut as glamorous an image. Tall, as handsome as an Italian version of John Wayne, multilingual and more demanding on himself than on his staff, Sirio both reveled in the rewards of the restaurant business even as he believed it was insanity to go into it. All of his three sons, Mario, Marco and Mauro, did so anyway.

         Though a proud Tuscan, Sirio Maccioni rose through the service ranks of deluxe French restaurants in Europe and New York to become one of the most influential restaurateurs in America and the world, and his company ran restaurants in several countries, including Delhi and Abu Dhabi. 

Born in Montecatini Terme,  in 1932 Maccioni escaped poverty in his own country after the war,  in which his father was killed, to take jobs in French restaurants in Europe and on the Home Lines cruise ship Atlantic, which brought him to ports such as Nassau, Port-au-Prince, Havana, and NYC, where he disembarked in 1956, penniless, to pursue his career in America. There he eventually rose to become maître d’ at NYC’s high society restaurant The Colony, where he acquired the knowledge and trust of its monied clientele, many of whom became his regulars upon his opening of his own restaurant, in 1973, with partner Jean Vergnes and a $100,000 loan undersigned by real estate titan William Zeckendorf Jr.

        At the time, Maccioni regarded the New York City French restaurants of the day as places “for masochists willing to submit to the French culinary act,” but contending that he wouldn’t dare to serve the kind of simple Italian food he truly loved.  “Right or wrong,” he said, “the way of restaurants in America was French. I love the trattorias of Italy, but America was not ready for this kind of cooking.” Nevertheless Le Cirque quickly became as much for its cuisine as for its clientele, who were constantly being photographed entering or exiting the restaurant for magazines like Town & Country, Vogue, New York,and W. 

In contrast to the staid, formal, cookie-cutter décor of French restaurants of the era, Le Cirque was more frivolous, with an orangerie motif and images of cavorting monkeys.  As food editor Michael Batterberry explained Maccioni’s methodology, “He dares to have fun.  He is the quintessential dashing Italian.  But behind all the bravura, he’s in a perpetual state of high hysteria. And all of his best customers are a part of it.  He involves you in some kind of ancient Italian agony that is far beyond the dashing maître d’.”

         Despite Chef Vergnes’ refusal to serve any Italian dishes at Le Cirque, Maccioni came up with one of the most popular spaghetti dishes of the century—pasta alla primavera—which became an international sensation. 

         After most of the old-line NYC French restaurants closed in the 1980s and 1990s, Le Cirque thrived and became a showcase for many of the finest chefs in America, incl. Alain Sailhac, Daniel Boulud, and Sottha Kuhn, and a kind of grad school for those who afterwards became famous in their own right, incl. David Bouley, Alfred Portale, Terrance Brennan, Jacques Torres, Michael Lomonaco, Alain Allegretti, Bill Telepan, Alex Stratta and Geoffrey Zakarian.

         Maccioni moved Le Cirque twice, in 1997 to The Palace Hotel in midtown, and in 2006 in the Bloomberg Tower on East 58^th Street.  With his wife Egidiana (“Egi”), he finally realized his dream to bring Tuscan food to NYC upon opening Osteria del Circo in 1996, with a branch to follow at Bellagio Hotel and Sirio Ristorante in The Aria Resort and Casino in Las Vegas. By the 1990s, Maccioni’s three sons, Mario, Marco and Mauro were working in their father restaurants, helping to expand the Maccioni brand to other cities, incl. branches of Le Cirque in Mexico City (now closed), the Dominican Republic, and New Delhi. 

         In 2004 Maccioni (with writer Peter Elliot) published his memoir, Sirio: The Story of My Life and Le Cirque. In 2003 Egi Maccioni published The Maccioni Family Cookbook.  The family was the subject of an HBO TV documentary called “A Table in Heaven (2007). 

         Maccioni’s awards incl. Joe Baum Lifetime Achievement Award from The Food Allergy Initiative (2000) and the Fine Dining Legend Winner Nation's Restaurant News (2003).