Ciro’s was a chain of restaurants that from the 1890s through the 1950s was as famous for the quality of its bars as it was for the excellence of its cuisine and the exclusivity of its clientele, and it was instrumental in naturalizing the American cocktail in Europe. With outposts in Monte Carlo, Paris, London, the French resorts of Deauville and Bagnères de Luchon, and eventually Berlin, Hollywood, and New York, Ciro’s was well placed to cater to the one-percenters of its day: royalty, aristocrats of all stripes, industrialists, celebrities of stage and, eventually, film, and ladies and gentlemen of elegant leisure. By the 1930s, the name “Ciro’s” had become so synonymous with luxury that it was widely appropriated by businesses unconnected with the original chain. At one point in the late 1930s there were wildcat Ciro’s operating in Philadelphia, Chicago, Miami Beach, Honolulu, Acapulco, Mexico City, and a host of other places.
Ciro’s began with one man: Ciro Capozzi (1855–1938), a sea captain’s son from Vico Equense on the Bay of Naples. In 1885 or thereabouts, the management of the Café de Paris, facing the Casino in Monte Carlo, opened a small American Bar with Capozzi as the head bartender. Unlike many who staffed so-called American bars in Europe, Capozzi had actually worked in America as a bartender, and always prided himself on that experience. See American bar. In fact, as he told a reporter for the Paris edition of the New York Herald in 1898, he “learnt [his] business with Jerry Thomas.” See Thomas, Jerry. His boast drew letters from Parisian bartenders disputing the claim (one of them implied that the closest he had come to Thomas was his book, “which is to be found in a drawer behind his bar”).
Yet New York immigration records do show one “C. Capozzi” arriving in the city in May of 1883, from Napoli, and Thomas died in 1885, so the claim is not impossible. It is also worth noting that Capozzi, a skilled mixologist, served drinks that were far simpler and closer to what Thomas served than the fantasies encountered at most European bars. When other bars were offering “Heaps of Comfort” and “Flip Flaps,” he was introducing Europe to the Manhattan and the Martini. (Other sources have him working in San Francisco, and others at the famous Delmonico’s, also in New York, which can be seen as a model for Capozzi’s future establishment.)
Engel, Leo. Capozzi added the space next door the next year, where he began serving elegant breakfasts and lunches, made from the finest ingredients, many of them imported specially from London’s top purveyors: Capozzi’s clientele was very strongly English and included the prince of Wales, who would show him cocktails he had learned. With the prince and American press baron James Gordon Bennett as regulars, he rapidly attracted the cream of Monte Carlo’s seasonal society. After a further expansion in 1897, Ciro’s became a true moneymaker. With his wife Clotilde as the cashier and his brother Salvatore as bar manager, things ran smoothly and profitably for Capozzi until 1911, when he sold the operation to a syndicate of investors from London and retired to his villa nearby, where he lived quietly for another twenty-seven years.In 1912, the London syndicate opened a branch of Ciro’s in Rue Daunou in Paris, with the same formula: a top-class bar, a stellar kitchen, the best of everything. As the Tatler put it at the time, “The opening of a new Ciro’s was more than an event, it was the date of a new epoch for Paris de luxe.” It instantly became one of the city’s top attractions (of its two large rooms, the one with the bar was where the elite sat; if that was full, they would go elsewhere rather than sit in the other one). In 1913, a seasonal branch at the Normandy seaside resort of Deauville followed, open only during the three weeks in summer when the races were held there. The next year saw another such establishment opened at Luchon, a then-fashionable spa town in the French Pyrenees; it would prove to be short-lived.
In 1915, the syndicate opened the lavish Ciro’s London. Organized as a private club to get around strict wartime closing hours, this establishment too was an immediate success. A good part of that was due to its head bartender, a young Scot with experience in France and New York. Harry McElhone was an expert at cocktails and knew how to treat the club’s clientele. Ciro’s was closed for a time in 1917 for violating licensing laws, by which time McElhone had already left to fight in France; he would return after the war, working there and at the Deauville branch until 1923, when he took over the famous New York Bar in Paris. See McElhone, Harry.
The Ciro’s empire continued successfully through the 1920s. In the early 1930s, it added loosely affiliated outposts in Hollywood and Berlin, but the first fell afoul of the Depression (it reopened as a private club for celebrities on the London model in 1940, but its degree of affiliation cannot be established), and the second did not survive the next war. In mid-1939, as war in Europe loomed, the Ciro’s consortium opened one last branch, on Central Park South in Manhattan. It was intended as a refuge for the high-flying social set that had frequented the European branches, out of range of the Luftwaffe but, as the New York Sun noted in early 1940, it “succeeded in being so exclusive that it failed for lack of trade.”
The Monte Carlo, Paris, and London Ciro’s all closed in the immediate postwar years. The Hollywood one made it into the 1960s, when it became one of the city’s premiere rock and roll clubs. Only the Deauville one still survives.
Before Capozzi’s, there were numerous American bars in Europe, but their clientele was largely composed of American expatriates and their drinks were viewed as novelties. With his charm, skill, and hospitality, Ciro Capozzi had the leverage to move the culture when the time was right to move it. It might be an exaggeration to say that he made the cocktail fashionable in Europe, but it would not be much of one. Before him, it was the rare aristocrat who would be seen drinking one; after him, sitting kings were lending their names to mixed drinks.
“A Bit of History-and the Moral.” Tatler, May 8, 1912, ix.
“Ciro at His Post on the Riviera.” New York Herald, Paris edition, November 30, 1890, Sunday supplement, 1.
“Current Architecture.” Architectural Review, May 1915, 93–96.
Davenay, G. “Ciro’s à Paris.” Le Figaro, April 12, 1912, 1.
“How to Prepare Real Cocktails.” New York Herald, Paris edition, April 27, 1898, 3.
Johnson, Malcolm. “Café Life in New York.” New York Sun, March 11, 1940, 21.
Wakefield, George. Letter, New York Herald, Paris edition, April 30, 1898, 5.
By: David Wondrich