Only at Le Cirque would you find a bar casually flanked by a flat-screen TV on one wall showing the 1956 musical High Society on and a computer screen on the other, ticking away U.S. treasury securities. But so it goes at the New York fixture's new wine lounge, where, as of Saturday, midtowners can revel -- sans sportscoat dress code -- in such bourgeois delights as, gasp, finger foods, like signature mini cheeseburgers (paired with a 2005 Bunyip Estates "Reserve" from Barossa Valley) and hamachi sashimi with green tea marinade (paired with saki) from executive chef Christophe Bellanca.

I popped in on Thursday to have a peek at the place, a very red space designed by Raphael Alberez of Design Elements. Le Cirque's call to the younger set seemed to be answered as a couple of pretty young brunettes on a low lying leather chaise chirped away in French beneath what appeared to be a suspended medicine cabinet with sliding glass doors. Perhaps unconvinced by the yoga-esque principle that has also been employed in the wine lounge -- that the more time one spends close to the earth the more relaxed one is -- the two ladies soon opted for big-girl seats at the bar.

Sirio Maccione

Perched on an orange leather ottoman waiting myself, I thought of the man who first told me about Le Cirque years ago. A friend's father, he was a slow-talking Nashville gentleman who favored silk pocket squares and in his younger days, Studio 54 and the Mud Club. He knew Le Cirque in its heyday of the late seventies and had described to me a magical place which I caught glimpses of here, in the Bloomberg Tower space they have occupied since 2006. In the wine lounge, it was the whimsical umbrella-like fixtures hanging from the ceiling and, in the dining room, there was the single perfect ravioli that punctuated my chicken consumee and the secret recipe revealed at the bottom of my crème brulee. But the imminent success of the latest addition sat at a table on the edge of the lounge, just outside the main dining room. The owner Sirio Maccione (who favors the Chicken Paillard with sautéed mushrooms and the Minute Steak with pommes frites and béarnaise) enjoyed lunch with his wife and dolled out double-cheek kisses to a bubbly young blonde, very much the duke of his newly extended domain. --LIZ MCDANIEL

READ MORE:
Walla Walla is more than just a wine town
Ronnybrook Milk Bar becomes a nobby Manhattan lunch counter

MVSTAT: In Tuscany, which has a boar population of about 150,000, the animals can weigh as much as 250 pounds. In Russia, boars can get as big as 600 pounds...