As with food trucks, it took a while for the trend of the pop-up restaurant to make it to Central Florida, but now that it’s here, it’s taking off.
I’ll have my first pop-up restaurant experience tomorrow (Saturday, March 24) when we turn the fish processing room at Gary’s Seafood Specialties into a dining room for one night only. Last week, however, I was invited to experience a different classification of a pop-up.
On Friday, March 16, Le Cirque, the legendary Manhattan restaurant owned and operated by Sirio Maccioni, took over the restaurant of downtown Orlando’s Citrus Club. Maccioni’s son Marco was there as host, and he brought the New York restaurant’s current executive chef, Olivier Reginensi, to cook some of Le Cirque’s menu. They even brought their own chargers and bread plates with the restaurant’s signature monkey motif.
Marco obviously learned well from his father how to be a gracious and welcoming host. He was ever present in the dining room and was generous with his time at each table. He has a decidedly different mien than Sirio with a shaggy mop-top hairdo that seems to have a life of its own.
My companions and I had all been to Le Cirque in New York as well as some of the family’s Las Vegas restaurants, Osteria del Circo, Sirio and Le Cirque at the Bellagio, so Maccioni regaled us with stories about those restaurants, his father and Marco’s brother.
The dinner was served in four courses with two or three choices in each course. I selected the lobster salad “Le Cirque” for my starter, which featured shelled lobster tail meat with haricots verts, sliced tomatoes, tender asparagus tips, fingerling potatoes and sliced avocado, all dressed in a black truffle vinaigrette. This salad is one of the signature lunch items at the restaurant in New York, and if he’s there, Sirio will likely add the dressing for you himself at the table.
My companions had the soft poached egg and morels with asparagus and chervil. The morels had a wonderfully soft chewiness.
I had the porcini risotto for my second course, a rather unexciting dish made with vialone nano rice, which is considered one of the best for risotto, with mushrooms and Parmigiano-Reggiano. I liked my friend’s potato ravioli better, with black truffle, cooked prosciutto and sage-sented veal jus.
Chicken, fish and beef were represented in the entree category. The filet of beef was served in a puddle of sauce bordelaise and topped with a bit of bone marrow. The black bass was wrapped in potatoes and sat atop a stack of braised leeks and potatoes and a Rocca di Frassinello wine sauce.
The pan roasted chicken was simple but my favorite. It had a classic country-style taste, and the carrots and peas were wonderful with it. (The fish was my second favorite, though it was disappointing to bite into a bone on the first taste.)
There were probably other choices for dessert but in my thinking there was really only one: creme brulee. Le Cirque claims to have concocted the classic, though that is disputed by others. This one couldn’t have been done much better. The custard was delightfully creamy and the burnt sugar topping had a perfect crunch.
In short, everything at the dinner was good. Was it transcendent? No. Did it offer something that couldn’t have been experienced without the presence of Maccioni, Reginensi and Le Cirque’s chargers? No.
The dinner I had at New York’s Le Cirque — at the time in the Palace Hotel and renamed Le Cirque 2000 — remains one of the most memorable of my career. The executive chef then was Sottha Kuhn and every morsel of his menu was exquisite. Of course, much of it had to do with being in the dining room in Manhattan. The excitement and electricity of what was then still a very important dining establishment were palpable. That’s something a pop-up of this type can’t reproduce.
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