The Brooklyn Rail

When I was getting ready to move to New York a decade ago, a family friend who’d grown up here sent me a list of bars and restaurants to check out. On the list was Minetta Tavern, which she pointed out I would need a reservation for, though she suggested just simply showing up and vying for a seat at the bar—her favorite way to eat there, she explained. Though not yet living in New York, even the act of looking these places up was exciting, affording me some projection or premonitions of a glamorous life to come. 

Unfortunately, shortly after arriving in New York as a broke twenty-three-year-old graduate student, newly-saddled with student debt, I was quickly disabused of the idea that I’d be dining at any of Manhattan’s more sought-after restaurants—a fact I confirmed by taking a quick look online at Minetta Tavern’s prices.

Of all the recommendations the family friend sent, though, something about Minetta Tavern marked itself out in my mind. Perhaps it was because the few pictures I found of it made it appear both glamorous and vaguely mysterious, redolent of a kind of old New York I knew only from the movies. Perhaps it was because I had arrived in the city harboring writerly ambitions, and Google told me that many luminous writers had once drank and eaten in the darkened tavern. Perhaps it was the fact that its owner Keith McNally’s surname is very common to the specific region in Ireland which I was from. 

What I didn’t know then was that, sooner or later, if you stick around New York long enough, there’s a not insignificant chance that—like Robert Moses and his roads and bridges—you will come across the name Keith McNally or one of the nineteen restaurants and bars he has built or owned here over the past forty years. 

McNally, who was born in Bethnal Green in London in 1951, emigrated to New York in 1975 and has been a notable fixture of the city ever since. A high-school drop-out, he tread the boards for a few years on the English theater circuit (starring in plays by Alan Bennett, with whom he once had an affair as a young man), before arriving in New York, more or less penniless, “with a vague plan to make films.” In his new memoir, I Regret Almost Everything, he recounts his unlikely journey from his working-class, East End upbringing, to becoming one of Manhattan’s most celebrated—and controversial—restaurateurs.

But films he did not make—at least not yet. When he first arrived, McNally lived in Flushing, deep in Queens, and worked variously (and illegally) as a busboy at an ice cream parlor, then an oyster shucker, later a server, before eventually becoming general manager at One Fifth, which was at the time one of downtown Manhattan’s few hip restaurants. It was while working at One Fifth, which was located just north of Washington Square Park and attracted an eccentric mix of patrons, that McNally was able to get sponsored (by his boss and mentor) for a green card, learned about the restaurant business, and acquired a lifelong aversion to overhead lighting and an appreciation for side lighting. 

From there, McNally’s ascent into the Manhattan restaurant world begins its slow, inexorable climb. During a trip to Paris at the invitation of friend, fellow compatriot, and longtime Vogue editor Anna Wintour, McNally fell in love with the city’s bistros and brasseries. Like all good students, McNally realized that he could no longer remain just a student—he would have to open a restaurant of his own. After scraping together 150,000 dollars in funding, McNally, along with his then-girlfriend (and future first ex-wife) Lynn Wagenknecht, and his bartending brother Brian (not long off the boat from England), opened the Odeon, in Tribeca, helping usher in the transformation of this largely underdeveloped part of the city into an integral part of downtown.

The Odeon, specifically, is often credited with helping create—or, at the very least, feed and water—the burgeoning, pre-yuppie, bohemian downtown scene where, on a given night, Lorne Michaels and the cast from Saturday Night Live might be found drinking with Andy Warhol or Jay McInerney. Regulars from One Fifth followed, word spread, and soon the Odeon became the toast of the town. His former boss at One Fifth never forgave him.

I Regret Almost Everything is broadly chronological, though McNally uses his stroke in 2016 (and a related suicide attempt years later) to supply the book with what dramatic tension it has. Followers of McNally’s infamous Instagram account may recognize some of the anecdotes from there—attentive readers might even recognize entire sentences. The book contains plenty of celebrity gossip and (mostly) amusing anecdotes about his interactions with some of the city’s notable landlords and restaurateurs. McNally’s willingness to throw himself under the bus provides the book with many laughs.

What first drew McNally to Instagram, he writes in I Regret Almost Everything, was his penchant for writing captions—and, though he doesn’t explicitly say it, a canny sense of its capacity to promote Keith McNally, the brand. It quickly became a way for him to share biographical details, his thoughts on pop culture, and the not infrequent (though frequently divisive) rants for which many of his 173,000 followers eagerly await. Love him or hate him, he has a knack for it. 

I do, however, think that McNally’s success at writing Instagram captions may have contributed to an inflated sense of worth of some of his thoughts. There are a few utterly inane—though thankfully brief—asides scattered throughout the book that I feel should have been left as drafts. To give an example of just one: flying over Greenland en route to New York, McNally ponders whether the island has any French restaurants, and if they ever run out of ice. Immediately proceeding this, he wonders whether Greenland is home to a restaurant critic whose review could close down a restaurant. Though harmless, these asides come off a little bizarrely—and are neither insightful nor funny. Such moments, thankfully, occur infrequently throughout the book, but just often enough to raise eyebrows.

With the Odeon doing well, McNally opened several more places with his wife—each new place becoming a destination in its own right—before deciding to give filmmaking an earnest shot. The result, End Of The Night (1990), which screened at Cannes but received no general release in the US, wasn’t what he had hoped for. Not only is he unhappy with the finished product, the stressful process of making the movie became a contributing factor in his first divorce, which saw Wagenknecht buy him out of the Odeon, Nell’s, and Cafe Luxembourg. 

Despite keeping the door open to potentially doing more filmmaking, it is not films, he was starting to realize, but food at which he excels. After casting about for a few years (and launching the incredibly popular Soviet-themed bar Pravda), McNally spotted a tannery one morning on Spring Street in SoHo, brimming with straps of leather. He immediately fell in love with the 12,000-square-foot space. After arranging to meet the landlord, he imagines opening a restaurant named “Brasserie Lafayette.” At the suggestion of a friend, he reconsiders this name. April 1997, Balthazar opens. 

For almost two decades, from the mid-nineties through the mid-teens, it seemed like McNally could do no wrong. Though there were setbacks—Alina, his second wife, was growing increasingly at odds with McNally’s kids from his first marriage, plus there were several restaurants that never quite took off, most notably Augustine and Pulino’s—McNally managed to create a string of restaurants and bars which were both exceptionally popular and profitable. In a city which finds itself in a constant tension between embracing the new and venerating the old, where 80 percent of new restaurants close within five years and food trends come as quickly as they go, McNally is notable for being rewarded again and again for sticking to his guns, avoiding trends, and trusting his own tastes. 

Love or hate his restaurants, they are fun, beautiful places to eat in, and a big part of the reason why is the atmosphere that McNally and his longtime architect and collaborator Ian McPheely create out of their regard for detail. As the decor of many of his restaurants suggest, McNally is a perfectionist. Whether scouring salvage yards in rural France for distressed furniture, or having a classically-trained sculpturist recreate two sculptures he’d seen on a postcard years earlier, McNally is driven to great lengths to fulfill the vision he has for each of his restaurants. “When designing my own restaurants,” he explains, “I designed them to deceive just as meticulously as I’d designed my character.”

The food at McNally’s restaurants is good, yes, but good food is hardly in short supply in New York—and it is widely available at a good deal less than the prices McNally charges for it at his restaurants. It is hard to say what, exactly, is so appealing about McNally’s restaurants, but the vibes play no small part. And what even are vibes? Vibes to a restaurant are simply what charisma is to a person—something so hard to put your finger on that the only thing easier to spot than a restaurant with good vibes is a restaurant with bad vibes. 

As to what he feels makes his restaurants this way, McNally is vague on the alchemy behind it. What he does insist on, however, is that the restaurant experience should be conducive to engagement, where customers are forced into proximity and intimacy with one another. Even his bigger restaurants feel intimate and cozy, and he once said his dream was to open a restaurant with ten tables. He claims that all of the tables for two at his restaurants are purposefully 26 inches long by 24 inches wide. (I’ve now eaten at three of his restaurants, and, while I certainly didn’t mind the small tables, my wife—who is 5’1” and far more attentive to detail than me—even noticed how small they are.) 

Would that it were all of life was simply as easy as designing and running a beautiful restaurant in Lower Manhattan. With his stroke—which saw him move back and forth from New York to London in search of treatment and rehabilitation programs, and, as a result, spending more time with his ex-wife and eldest children—the chasm between him and Alina widens. Just as he struggles to adjust to his life post-stroke (he was unable to physically take care of himself for some time, and hasn’t regained his pre-stroke capacity for fluent conversation), he also struggles with relinquishing control over the direction of his restaurants to the children he tasked with overseeing them. Such is his inability that they eventually recuse themselves.

Family, for McNally, is a recurrent and somewhat painful undercurrent coursing through the book. He never seems quite at ease with his parents, younger sister Josephine, and two older brothers, Brian and Peter. Though they recur throughout the book in various ways, it feels at times that the only part of his carefully-crafted persona he cannot manage or control—if not outright run—is the family into which he was born. When his brother Brian moved to New York, not long after McNally arrived, McNally notes how quickly people took to liking Brian and wonders if New York is big enough to accommodate two McNallys. In one of the book’s most painful moments, he remembers a time late in his parents’ lives—after they’d separated—when his mother flew to New York to spend two weeks with him. He recalls, with some embarrassment and regret, that he made so many excuses throughout her trip, cancelling their plans and dulling her excitement, that, after four days, she packed up and flew home early, leaving him standing alone at JFK, simmering in all that remained unsaid between them.

His own family—by which I mean his two families—seems like his attempt at creating family on his own terms. He is admirably frank, and mostly self-aware, when reflecting on his shortcomings, whether as son or sibling, husband or parent. In one of the most poignant reflections, McNally admits to having all but abandoned his daughter Isabelle (his youngest child with first wife Lynn) when she was suffering from major depressive disorder and staying at a hospital in Massachusetts. He writes of his genuine remorse at having made up excuses to avoid visiting her. This is underscored by the fact that, years later, Isabelle came to visit him when he was suffering from depression after his stroke. In another twist of the knife, after a botched suicide attempt would later leave him in McLean Hospital, he learns that he is staying in the same psychiatric hospital that he had avoiding visiting Isabelle in ten years earlier. 

I don’t know that anyone needed a book about Keith McNally’s triumphs. There are streets you can walk down in Manhattan and see those. As its title suggests, I Regret Almost Everything is not that. It is instead a frank, highly personal reflection on fifty-odd years of doubts, regrets, and near misses, interspersed with the successes for which he has now become synonymous. McNally and his story epitomize an idea I’ve long held about coming to New York in search of your dreams. You might not get what you want here, but you will get something.