As the fashion for haute cuisine falls away, the more casual wine bar has become a kind of economic savior for the city's classic high-end chefs — one reason, as we noted in our Fall Preview year, the likes of Daniel Boulud and Alain Ducasse have embraced the genre wholeheartedly. (It's easier to lure customers into wine bars, and wine is a much higher-profit item than food.) Now Le Cirque has gotten into the act, opening its new wine bar tonight. Says the restaurant’s legendary owner, Sirio Maccioni: “Our new wine lounge is a more casual side of Le Cirque, with chaise longues and where no jackets are required. We wanted to offer something, in our lounge, without all the rigueur of the dining room.” The centerpiece of the wine bar is an immense wine tower, with, according to Maccioni, “20,000 bottles of wine and the right menu to go with it.” Somehow it just doesn’t seem right to go to Le Cirque without a jacket, though — no matter how many bottles of wine they have.

Le Cirque wine-bar menu

Related: Grape Nuts [NYM]

There’s an entertaining and incisive interview with Le Cirque's Sirio Maccioni at Portfolio today. Lloyd Grove presses the great man on his feelings about the New York Times critic ("Frank Bruni, if that's his name"), the firing of chef Pierre Schaedelin ("Pierre could have stayed"), and what it takes to make a restaurant work on that level in New York ("Here you need to do a minimum of $12 million a year. Otherwise we are broke"). The interview was done before the Times restored the restaurant's third star, so there's a lot of fire there. Things seem to be better now: We stopped in the other night, and Sirio's son Mario told us that after the review, “My father didn't yell at anybody for four days.”

World According To…Sirio Maccioni [Portfolio via Gawker]

We have some bad news. The bagel, that beloved, affordable symbol of New York cuisine, has gentrified. Chef Frank Tujague of the Westin hotel in Times Square (where else?) has unveiled the $1,000 white-truffle bagel, "topped with white truffle cream cheese and goji berry infused Riesling jelly with golden leaves." Now we love all truffles, far too much to ever be so rash as to declare them to be so over, and there may not be a thing on earth that's not improved by them (we've even considered using truffle oil as conditioner — it probably works wonders for split ends). But now that truffles are toying with the doughy purity of simple bagels, we have to wonder: Is this white-truffle thing not getting just a bit too precious?