With all the talk of newspapers' declining influence, and amidst all the food blogs, a bad review from Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni will still throw your kitchen into absolute chaos, Le Cirque founder Sirio Maccioni reveals to Portfolio. "Who's [Frank Bruni]? I don't know him," he snarks. (Oh, and it's hard even for Maccioni to get a reservation at the Waverly Inn: "You have to call Vanity Fair."). After the jump: how a bad NYT review in 2006 prompted him to change everything.

"If you've ever dined at Le Cirque, wishing you could have donned just flip-flops and a caftan instead of Louboutins and Yves Saint Laurent, now's the chance..." Jump into your Gulfstream G550s, people. The Maccioni clan is opening up a restaurant in the Dominican Republic. [WWD]

It doesn't officially open, for normal people, for another week. But, even so, today is apparently New Le Cirque day in the New York press. The are nearly 4,000 tag-teamed words on the cover of the Observer about it — and, in fairness, about the Bloomberg building in which it resides. David Carr has another 1,500 words on the front of the Times dining section about the restaurant and its many opening parties. There's even a Carpetbagging-style video report on the opening party on the Times site, reminding us of both Le Cirque's fabulosity and why Carr became a print reporter in the first place. The message of all of this? That it's a big, very fancy, important restaurant for a big, fancy, very important people. That it's exclusive and in-demand, and high society is quietly calculating how to get a table and which table to want to get.