An all-star crowd, including Woody Allen, Barbara Walters, Martha Stewart, Walter Cronkite, Joan Rivers, Tony Bennett, Johnny Damon and Bill Cosby, was on hand at the Bloomberg Building on East 58th Street last night to inspect the third incarnation of New York's most legendary restaurant, Sirio Maccioni's Le Cirque.
The Post reports: In a city where few things are taken as seriously as high-end food and bold-faced names, nobody has combined the two in such spectacular fashion as Le Cirque, which opened 32 years ago on East 65th Street, and later moved, as Le Cirque 2000, to the Palace Hotel. It was a beehive around which the rich, the beautiful and the notorious buzzed in a way that no place before or since has equaled.
"Just like its name, it was a circus," says gossip doyenne Liz Smith, a longtime regular. "Everyone in public life went there. You always saw somebody a lot more important than you were."
A couple of years ago my friend Jay and I had lunch at Le Cirque 2000 during its final week at the Palace and I have to say it was one of my favorite New York moments. I never eat in fancy restaurants but I'd been given a $250 gift certificate from my former employer (who had long since shit-canned me) and I was finally getting around to using it. I felt like a little boy wearing my dad's sport coat(!) as we sat in the bar area of this schmancy dining room waiting for our table to be ready. 
Jay suddenly had a big smile on his face as he told me to look over my shoulder: straight out of a Vanity Fair article there was Dominick Dunne, holding court at a huge table of nip/tux-ed ladies who lunch, talking about (what else) the Scott Peterson case at the top of his lungs. We both thought it was so ridiculously predictable that we could barely stop laughing.
Finally we were seated and the service, atmosphere and most of all the food were all impeccable. I only hope I get the chance to eat at the new locale.
Friday, May 19, 2006
Cirque-It Party
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