Where Sirio Greeted Us Beautifully

Four Upper East Side who GRANDES DAMES, were reminisce. REGULAR S,

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. KIMBERLY YASEEN, past chair of various fundraisers for the American Cancer Society and the New York Philharmonic: Sophia Loren would be there, or Ron Perelman would be holding court, or Gayfryd Steinberg. You looked across the room and every

body just sparkled. They looked beautiful.

JG: People came in dressed for the occasion. All the women had a Bill Blass suit or an Oscar de la Renta dress. You didn’t go to that restaurant coming from the gym. You wouldn’t walk in there unless you were pulled together.

BT: It was chic. My husband always wore a tie and suit, and he always looked elegant. He was a real gentleman. And I look at these guys today, and some of them are very, very handsome. But they look like they just came out of the gym. Why? I mean, do you really think you look so gentlemanly and terrific and handsome that way? No, you don’t. It’s pitiful.

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.

SM: We went there for lunch for a reason. By the end of two hours, you had figured out your whole committee. It was done. We didn’t have texting back then. You took out a little piece of paper; you had a pen. We planned the sponsoring committee for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund—the one in New York, not in Washington— at lunch at Le Cirque. I remember Pat Buckley used the house phone and called Nancy Reagan and she agreed to join.

JG: If you were celebrating something or wanted to have a good giggle with your girlfriend, that was the place to go.

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?”