After forty-two years, three homes, uncountable chefs, one Nazi-related Yelp scandal, and a dozen Times reviews (one of them arguably the most iconic work of restaurant criticism in history), the Upper East Side gastronomic institution Le Cirque has announced that it will be closing its doors after service on New Year’s Eve. The Maccioni family, which has owned and operated the restaurant since its opening, in 1974, has made noises about looking for a new, smaller space somewhere near Madison Avenue, but the prospect seems remote, and licensed iterations in far-flung locales like Las Vegas and Bangalore are merely shadows of the original. This is, in all likelihood, the end of Le Cirque as we know it.

It’s not the first of its tony, white-tableclothed, maître d’-led cohort to go, and, perhaps compared to the toasting and eulogizing and rending of garments that accompanied the end of the Four Seasons’ lease, last year, Le Cirque’s final days may slip past quietly. But for a time, a sunlit heyday that lasted decades, Le Cirque was the epitome of a clubby Manhattan fine-dining scene whose snobbishness, far from undermining the enterprise, was the mighty engine of its success.

As the name implies, Le Cirque is ostensibly circus-themed, with a tented ceiling and monkey paintings and that sort of thing. Its real theme, though, is power, one of those restaurants where titans of industry and well-preserved A-listers triple-kiss the dapper European stationed at the lectern. Sirio Maccioni, Le Cirque’s patriarch, overlord, and mascot, wields his considerable charisma with weaponized precision. Though a procession of great chefs have honed their skills in the Le Cirque kitchen (Boulud, Bouley, Torres, Telepan, Allegretti), at Le Cirque and its fine-dining cousins—Nello, the various Ciprianis, Michael’s, etc.—it is almost an unwritten rule that the food is neither the draw nor the point. At the moment last year when the doors closed forever at the Four Seasons, the average quality of restaurant fare in New York ticked upward.

Restaurants like these are double operations: one portion is devoted to courting and maintaining a core clientele through exquisite ministrations (a house account, a regular table, an off-menu menu, a trusty unflappability when presented with a comely non-spouse, perhaps identified discreetly as a niece or a family friend), while the other portion consists, more or less, of selling tickets to that glittering floor show. Tourists and power gawkers are happy to overpay wildly for insipid carpaccio and wedding-banquet sea bass in exchange for the privilege of proximity. Dine at Le Cirque or Michael’s or “21” and you, too, can breathe the same air as Martha Stewart and Barry Diller, if only for the half-minute it takes for you to cross the floor of the main dining room while on your way to your ill-lit table in plebe Siberia.

Le Cirque’s stratified service program was an open secret from its first days, but the stark difference in how the other half dined was blown open in 1993, by Ruth Reichl, in her first published review as the Times’ restaurant critic. It was an instantly legendary column, written as a tale of two strikingly different dinners, one characterized by staff indifference and plates of brown slop, the other by coddling attention and transcendent platings. Whose spine wouldn’t straighten just a little when waltzed into the dining room after being told, as Reichl was, “The king of Spain is waiting in the bar, but your table is ready”?

In her memoir “Garlic and Sapphires,” Reichl recalls the experience in more detail, writing that for her first visits to the restaurant, a wretched ordeal she would have rated one star, she called on the services of an acting coach to help disguise her as a frumpy commoner. To dine at the other Le Cirque, to be presented with rapturous Maccionian attentions and a meal verging on the divine, the experience that had earned the restaurant four stars under the previous Times critic, Bryan Miller, Reichl simply had to be herself, which just happened to be the newly crowned, most powerful restaurant voice in the world. She averaged these polar experiences to give Le Cirque three stars, which at the time constituted a scandalous demotion. (Nearly twenty years later, in the Times’ most recent critical essay of Le Cirque, in 2012, the paper’s current restaurant critic, Pete Wells, knocked down the entirety of the operation—one of his meals tasted “of refrigeration and surrender”—to one star.)

The Le Cirque of the late eighties and early nineties enjoyed the kind of instantaneous name recognition that few establishments, dining or otherwise, manage to attain. When Olivia Goldsmith published “The First Wives Club,” in 1992—a novel that later became a 1996 film—the flap copy took readers’ familiarity of these corridors of soft power as a given: “While lunching at Le Cirque,” the sentence that introduces the trio of protagonists opened, and in five words—two of them the restaurant name—we’re told nearly everything we need to know about the geography, income, class, race, daily schedules, social lives, and cultural values of the women at the center of this novel. It’s a marvel of an opening phrase, an all-timer for sheer efficiency of sociological characterization.

In the years since this heyday, Le Cirque has moved twice, and adopted and discarded the poorly future-proofed name “Le Cirque 2000.” Earlier this year, the restaurant declared bankruptcy, and, in a move that did nothing to bolster its reputation among liberal New Yorkers, played host to a quarter-million-dollar-per-couple R.N.C. fund-raiser, headlined by Donald Trump. (After online reviewers flooded the restaurant’s Yelp page in protest, an account with the name Sirio Maccioni called critics of the President “social media nazi white supremacists.”) As the dining world has become more self-consciously casual, and more democratic, Le Cirque has also strived, with varying degrees of success, to at least pretend to treat diners of all stripes with equanimity. But a Sirio Maccioni defanged of his flattery and his eye for hierarchy is hardly a Sirio Maccioni at all.

In the end, the restaurateur’s most lasting contribution to the world may end up being not an exalted snobbishness but a single, accidental culinary innovation that has had a far-reaching effect on the American culinary repertoire. “I believe it started in 1975, when I visited Prince Edward Island with a number of colleagues, including Craig Claiborne of the New York Times,” Sirio recounted in a 2012 issue of Saveur, though at other times he’s placed the fishing trip in Nova Scotia, or in 1974, and in his memoirs he gives credit for the dish to his wife. Some facts remain consistent in all tellings: after a week, the group grew fatigued of dining on lobster and wild boar, so Maccioni mixed up a dish of pasta dressed with fresh vegetables and a creamy sauce. After the trip, Claiborne and his collaborator, Pierre Franey, wrote up the preparation in the Times, giving the dish a name: spaghetti alla primavera. Then—per Maccioni—diners at Le Cirque began to request it, to the great dismay of the restaurant’s French chef, Jean Vergnes, who was so deeply affronted by the wild success of an Italianate dish that he refused to allow it into his kitchen. “I didn’t want a crisis,” Maccioni told Saveur. “So I decided to prepare it in the dining room, on a cart, tableside.” Even the water for the pasta couldn’t enter Vergnes’s kitchen; it was boiled in a hallway adjoining the dining room.

Pasta alla primavera, which is now a fairly weeknight combination of noodles, vegetables, and cream, was, in its beginnings, a preparation of not immodest delicacy and artfulness. The name means springtime, a reference perhaps not so much to the particular ingredients—a multi-seasonal bouquet including broccoli, zucchini, button mushrooms, tomatoes, and green beans, all garnished with wintry pine nuts—than to the over-all novelty of a plate of pasta punctuated with al-dente vegetal brightness. From the moment Claiborne and Franey called it “by far, the most talked-about dish in Manhattan,” it was the restaurant’s best-seller, its culinary calling card, carts for its tableside preparation as constant a presence in the dining room as toupees and Brioni suits. And yet Maccioni never, ever put pasta alla primavera on the menu; you had to know to ask for it. Even at its most populist, Le Cirque guarded the gate.