Who

Maccioni is the Italian restaurateur who happens to oversee one of New York's most famous French restaurants, Le Cirque.

Backstory

Raised in a poor home in Tuscany—he lost his mother to pneumonia when he was a little kid—Maccioni departed his native Italy several years after WWII and moved to Paris, then Hamburg, where he worked as a waiter. Following a short stop-off in pre-Castro Cuba, Maccioni arrived in New York in 1956; within a few years, he'd worked his way up to become maitre d' at one of the city's most exclusive eateries, the Colony.

After successfully charming his way into high society, in 1974 Maccioni went out on his own and opened Le Cirque, improbably conquering French cuisine despite his decidedly un-French roots. Following more than two decades at the Mayfair Hotel, in 1997 Maccioni moved the restaurant to the Palace Hotel and renamed it Le Cirque 2000). In 2006 he moved again, this time to a grand, Adam Tihany-designed space on the ground floor of the Bloomberg Tower, otherwise known as One Beacon Court.

These days Maccioni presides over several other venues. With his wife Egidiana and their three sons, Mario, Marco, and Mauro, he controls Osteria del Circo in Midtown, Le Cirque outposts in Las Vegas and Mexico City (and one in London coming soon), and a restaurant in Casa de Campo.

Of note

More than three decades after its debut, Le Cirque remains a fixture on the scene—notwithstanding the fact that the age of the average Le Cirque diner probably exceeds the temperature in the room on most days—making it a rarity in a town where most restaurants fade after a year or two. Since its early days, the tony eatery has been a fave of some of the most prominent power brokers and society fixtures in town: Oscar de la Renta, Henry Kissinger, Helen Gurley Brown, Mario Cuomo, Ron Perelman, Ivana Trump, and Carolina Herrera are all longtime customers. Le Cirque's kitchen has been a training ground for a long list of culinary superstars, including Daniel Boulud, Sottha Khunn, Michael Lomonaco, Geoffrey Zakarian, and Jacques Torres.

Drama

Maccioni has long been accused of favoring celebs and powerbrokers over the hoi polloi. As the Times' dining critic, Ruth Reichl visited the restaurant both in disguise and as herself, and wrote about how different the experiences were. (Famously, Maccioni made Juan Carlos I, the King of Spain, wait by the bar so an undisguised Reichl could be seated.) Frank Bruni noticed much the same when he visited in 2006: "Le Cirque connotes a culinary pecking order by which the rich and famous get the best tables and others get to breathe the same air." Bruni's negative review resulted in a downgrade to two stars and Maccioni subsequently booted the chef, Pierre Schaedelin. The prickly Italian has had run-ins with other critics. After Times critic William Grimes panned Osteria del Circo, which is managed by his sons, Maccioni hardly held back: "When a reviewer has an ugly wife, he can never be very good."

In print

In 2004, Maccioni published Sirio: The Story of My Life and Le Cirque, with the help of co-author Peter Elliot.

Personal

Sirio and Egidiana live in the Museum Tower in Midtown. Neighbors in the building include financier Carl Icahn, MoMA chief Glenn Lowry, and Estée Lauder honcho John Demsey.

No joke

One Le Cirque regular who wasn't necessarily a fan: Rudy Giuliani, who dined there regular for years at the insistence of Judi Nathan. He later revealed that he often threw up afterwards because he couldn't take the heavy French cuisine.