Lobster salad (
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Tuna tartare, creme brulee, pasta primavera . . . today, these dishes are so ubiquitous on restaurant menus across the city as to elicit a jaded foodie yawn. But there was a time when such menu items were new and revolutionary, and, as legend would have it, they were all launched to culinary stardom at one restaurant: Le Cirque.
A new cookbook, “A Table at Le Cirque,” offers the recipes and stories behind some of the 37-year-old Upper East Side restaurant’s most iconic culinary inventions and tells how they’ve been served to everyone from kings to presidents to Hollywood celebrities — by a multitude of well-known chefs, from Daniel Boulud to Jacques Torres, who did time in the Le Cirque kitchen.
PHOTOS: 3 LEGENDARY RECIPES FROM LE CIRQUE
We sat down with Le Cirque owner Sirio Maccioni, 80 and still dapper, and his son and co-owner Marco, to discuss some of the restaurant’s best-known and oft-imitated dishes. “Each chef has left his mark with us and that’s what this book recognizes: Our dishes have staying power,” says Marco.
Creme brulee
You thought creme brulee was a French classic? Think again. Sirio says he got the idea for the dessert after having crema Catalan — a rich, vanilla custard preserved with a sugar top — when King Juan Carlos of Spain invited the Maccioni family over to watch the 1982 World Cup. Back home in the States, his wife, Egidiana (“the best chef and smartest person in the family”), and chef Alain Sailhac, who helmed the kitchen at Le Cirque from 1978 to 1986 and is now the dean emeritus at the International Culinary Center in SoHo, developed their own version. Theirs featured a crust of brown sugar made crisp under the broiler. “It was copied by everybody in the world,” says Sailhac. Even Sirio’s good friend chef Paul Bocuse asked to come in to learn how to make it. “If Paul Bocuse wanted to make the creme brulee that means it was good,” says Sailhac. “He’s the pope of French gastronomy.”
Le Cirque stove
In 1991, Jacques Torres, then a pastry chef at the restaurant, created a life-size chocolate stove for renowned food columnist Pierre Franey’s 70th birthday party. The stove came complete with a cake inside the oven, removable pots of mango-passion fruit and raspberry coulis on the burners and a chocolate checkerboard-floor tile. “Everybody was like, ‘Wow,’ so when I came back, I put it on the menu,” recalls Torres of the dish that helped push fine restaurants away from the dessert cart toward the trend of more prominent, plated desserts. The stove is still on the menu and is one of Robert De Niro’s favorite dishes. Torres has yet to hear of any chocolate stove copycats. “No one is crazy enough,” he says.
Pasta primavera
Sirio coined and developed this famous spaghetti dish in 1975, but it’s never actually been on the French restaurant’s menu out of respect to the original chef, Jean Vergnes. He insisted, in the words of Marco, “It was an Italian dish — it wasn’t proper to have it [in a French restaurant].” After critics wrote about it, customers began requesting it, so Sirio had his waiters verbally sell it; they continue to do so to this day. Donald Trump and Gael Greene are fans of the dish, which is prepared tableside, with a server lightly sauteing raw peas, broccoli, asparagus, zucchini, pignoli nuts, spinach and tomatoes.
Lobster salad
Le Cirque’s lobster salad, introduced in 1978, personified luxury on a plate. But it wasn’t just for ladies who lunch. “Everyone considers us the establishment, but Frank Zappa, the king of the anti-establishment, was a dear friend and fan,” says Marco. When he had dinner for the first time at Le Cirque, he arrived wearing an Armani suit over a T-shirt and no tie. “[My dad] said, ‘Yes, I’ll give you a table, but you have to wear a tie,’ ” says Marco. After eating what he later described as “the best lobster salad in the world,” Zappa then asked to borrow the tie he was loaned. Sirio told him he could keep it.
Tuna tartare
“We were the first ones to do a tuna tartare,” says Sirio, before his son Marco clarifies, “An elegant tuna tartare.” Before the early 1980s, raw fish was typically avoided. “If you told someone you were going to eat raw fish, it was like, ‘You’re going to get hepatitis,’ ” says Marco. “But then suddenly the boom of sushi in New York opened up the mind of the American diner.” Cambodian-born chef Sottha Khunn, who served as head chef from 1996 to 2000, brought his Asian-style culinary background to Le Cirque, and came up with this recipe that pairs finely diced tuna and crisp vegetables with a curried mayonnaise in 1986 and ’87, when he was a sous chef under Boulud. It remains on the menu today, where it’s a favorite of Henry Kissinger’s wife, Nancy.