Keith McNally's Regrets... and his Dazzling, Driven Life

I hardly knew the restaurateur Keith McNally in his heyday of the 80s and 90s. (He hates the word restaurateur. “Does a plumber call himself a plombier?”) Even though I was friends with many of the same people on both sides of the Atlantic, from Tom Stoppard in the UK to the swashbuckling art critic Robert Hughes and neurologist Oliver Sacks in New York. I didn’t overlap much with the protean Keith in my magazine editing days. This might be a strange omission given that Keith was creator of the epicenters of New York’s downtown restaurant culture with such mythic eateries as The Odeon, Balthazar, and Pastis, which have continued to sizzle for decades, but the Keith space in my life wasn’t entirely an accident. He famously feuded over differing work ethics and a fight that turned physical with his brother, the restaurateur Brian (cf. Indochine), a pugnacious raconteur himself who loved pulling up a chair to entertain diners with erudite conversation, much to Keith’s irritation when they were partners at The Odeon. And since one of Brian’s restaurants, 44, was close to the New Yorker offices on West 44^th St. and became my lunchtime hangout, I was on Team Brian. To be friends with both brothers was, for a period, hazardous.

Now comes Keith’s addictive new memoir I Regret Almost Everything and I realize what I missed : not more nights in the enfolding ambience of warm leather banquettes, fabulous glowing bar or a wait staff who move with the disciplined choreography of a corps de ballet, the trademarks of his restaurants, but his gifts as a writer. It turns out Keith has an instantly compelling literary voice. From the first page, which dives straight into the shock of his suicide attempt in August 2018 in Martha’s Vineyard, I was hooked by his relaxed conversational intimacy, his searching self-scrutiny, and his mordant eye that notices all the right things. I would have wrangled him as a Vanity Fair columnist in a heartbeat.

Perhaps in those days, though, he wouldn’t have been so honest. Before the devastating stroke that changed his life forever in 2016 – “the horrific tingling shot up my left arm and, like some malignant jellyfish, clasped itself onto my face” – he might have lacked the empathetic insights of damage, or been unable to review so unsparingly how he behaved toward many of the people he loved during the upward trajectory of his dazzling, driven life. There’s a memorable moment when, after the suicide attempt triggered by his cratering second marriage, he approaches the “austere and unwelcoming” Boston psychiatric facility McLean Hospital in an ambulance and realizes this is the same facility where he had failed to visit his daughter Isabelle ten years before when she was admitted for depression. “This was the place that had plagued me for so long,” he writes in guilty retrospect. “This was my appointment in Samarra.”

There’s a lethal portrait of his second wife Alina, an elusive beauty who torments, enchants, and ultimately devastates him when, after 15 years of marriage, she files for divorce a year after his stroke. His five children from two unions are the forces that sustain him as he fights his way back to a kind of equilibrium. He’s been left with a paralyzed right side, and speech that anguishes him with slurry imprecision that he combats with trenchant wit over email and Instagram. (“If you ever commit suicide, please make sure that Balthazar’s Steak au Poivre is your last meal.”) He pecks away with his left hand, a self-described “southpaw,” as boxers like to say.

Balthazar and its famous Steak au Poivre

In the crackle of an iconic career, Keith’s story has an irresistibly Dickensian flavor: the working-class scamp, youngest of three street-fighting brothers from London’s Bethnal Green, their father a stevedore who loaded cargo on and off ships. His mother cleaned offices, was a ferocious reader, and considered herself a cut above her husband, despising his inarticulate stoicism that failed to move them up the council house waiting list. Keith escaped his parent’s “grim, joyless” marriage through the theater, talent-spotted when he was working as a bellhop at the London Hilton to audition for the role of a street urchin in, appropriately enough, Mr. Dickens of London. The change agent in his life was the brilliant, donnish playwright and satirist Alan Bennett, who cast Keith at age 17 as one of the 20 boy students in Forty Years On, his classic play within a play set in an upper-class boarding school and starring Sir John Gielgud. The bombshell Keith drops in the book is that he had an affair – one of only two homosexual relationships in his life – with Bennett, whose circle of clever friends and cultural sophistication were the window into a world the scrawny Keith McNally from Bethnal Green could only dream about. Given how desperately private the now 90-year-old Bennett is known to be, this revelation has been as unwelcome as it is riveting.

It might be easy to assume that Keith’s theatrical flair is the key to his serial success as a restaurateur. In fact, his secret sauce is his talent for real estate, an instinct that hits him again and again, like a tuning fork that suddenly pings at some derelict corner of urban decline. His genius is in creating places where the theater will stage itself.

Tribeca, site of The Odeon, the first restaurant he created with his first wife Lynn Wagenknecht, a hero in the book for her post-divorce loyalty, is now Manhattan's fanciest and most expensive neighborhood, the haunt of Goldman Sachs trophy families and their nanny-driven stroller fleets and pampered look-alike cockapoos. But, in 1980, it was a no-man’s-land. You couldn't buy groceries there or get clothes dry-cleaned, and many of the lofts that would later go for eight figures were still nut-roasting factories or the not-quite-legal domiciles of artists who were as much on the verge as the neighborhood. (“The brink of change is always more thrilling than the change itself,” he writes.) And though you couldn't say the same for Cafe Luxembourg’s location on the Upper West Side in the early 80s – by then a thoroughly domesticated realm – or of SoHo in the late 90s, where Balthazar was birthed, the spots McNally picked there were still on the edge, especially the Balthazar site. His inspiration for that restaurant was a sepia photo in a Paris flea market of a turn-of-the-century bar with hundreds of liquor bottles stacked twenty feet high, flanked by two towering statues of semi-nude women. In a remote salvage yard in Burgundy, he found six 19th-century train compartment luggage racks and deemed them perfect to install above Balthazar’s banquettes. And so a legendary restaurant that is still packed with revelers today came together detail by inspired detail.

The semi-nude statues and the scene at Balthazar

With his hit bistro Pastis, McNally pioneered the Meatpacking District, conjuring the place out of the cool night air in 1998 after leaving a dinner party in the area. “I came to an intersection with so many corners, it could have been an Italian piazza. Except that this intersection was desolate and my imaginary piazza would have scores of tables and chairs spilling onto the sidewalk. I stood there taking in the wasteland. After five minutes or so, I began looking at each one of the six corners for a restaurant space.” Each of his new watering holes begins with an epiphany in nowhere, followed by a manic, unstoppable drive to find the perfect building, décor, and menu.

It’s a marvel that he conquered his infirmities to the point that he recently created Minetta Tavern in Washington, where the vol-au-vents are allegedly to die for – and, on the floor above, his secretive Lucy Mercer Bar, named for FDR’s mistress, is perfect for comfortable, hidden seduction. In true McNally form, both sprang up last year in a recently shabby alley he alighted on in the Union Market neighborhood and instantly turned into a hip phenomenon.

The memoir gives a sense of how Keith creates such esprit de corps in his wait staff, who often stay for decades. He’s always noticing the particular skills of people on the lower rungs of life, like Freddy, the Jamaican hospital orderly whose “uneducated goodness is seldom rewarded in the corporate world,” or Abi, a male nurse at St John Hospital in London, who “cared about his patients without making a fuss about caring.” Keith never makes a fuss about caring either. Instead, he subtly creates a sense that, if you're there, you belong there, not because you've elbowed through some arduous gatekeeping process, but because your comfort is being seen to, and all you have to do is enjoy it. That feeling, Keith understands, never goes out of fashion. The most stylish among us, whatever the era, will always want to be able to just relax somewhere and feel protected, fed, watered, and taken care of. Even Nell's, that terrifyingly chic nightclub he built with his then-wife Lynn and friend Nell Campbell in 1986, always felt homey and relaxed, unlike the shiny, hard-edged worlds within other white-hot nightspots. Since his stroke, Keith writes, “I’m more aware that it’s the unnecessary things that make life civilized …accidental gestures of kindness have a disproportionate effect on me.”

McNally’s Thompson St. apartment (credit: Brooke Holm)

Enamored by the candor of his memoir, I emailed Keith and he promptly invited me to lunch at his Thompson Street apartment between Spring and Broome, the same block he lived on 48 years ago, soon after he arrived in NYC. He now resides there alone except for his visiting kids. The place has a warm Charleston house ambience – dhurrie rugs, a lot of rattan, a book-laden farmhouse table, and walls alive with mostly 20th-century art of the Fauvist and Bloomsbury era hung floor to ceiling with eclectic flair. He’s reconciled along the way with his brother Brian, who had just left after an overnight stay in an adjacent bedroom.

Having read in the memoir about Keith’s impaired speech, I was nervous about how it would be if I couldn’t understand him. But under the quizzical gaze of those bright, penetrating eyes, you quickly forget his speech difficulties. His rough, graying beard and lopsided smile communicate a piratical charm that’s survived his ordeals. We roller-coastered through shared names from the past, from London theater in the 70s to Condé Nast in the 80s, and the multiple books he’s avidly reading. Lunch was prosciutto and cream cheese on focaccia, which was so delicious I have eaten it every day since. Unable to sign his memoir by hand, he’s had an ink stamp made which says I Regret Everything except signing this book for you and another that says I Regret Everything INCLUDING signing this book for you. I got the first one and an invitation to dinner with Keith and Brian together at Balthazar in May. That will be epic.

P.S. By the time I got home, people were pinging me about a mischievous McNally Instagram post. “With Tina Brown at my place. Tina and I go back……..2 hours. Though we’ve moved in (somewhat) similar circles for 30-odd years we never actually met until 1pm today. Last week she wrote me the most wonderful email about my memoir so I invited her to my place today and immediately proposed marriage. The ceremony is at Balthazar next Tuesday.” See you there.