Restaurateur Keith McNally on His New Memoir: ‘I Wasn’t Harsh Enough’

Balthazar, Pastis, Minetta Tavern, and Morandi are just some of the transformative, wildly successful and famous Manhattan restaurants Keith McNally has opened and run for decades. Each room imparts a promise of louche, sophisticated cool along with a memorable and delicious meal. “The Restaurateur Who Invented Downtown” the New York Times once called him, a blurb that resides on the cover of McNally’s brilliant new memoir, I Regret Almost Everything. The book is a must-read for anyone who cares about the restaurant scene of the last 40 years — or just wants to hear a worldy raconteur tell the story of an epic life, full of feuds and ups and downs, with brutal candor. 

Fittingly, McNally admits to hating the word restaurateur, among quite a few other things he loathes. In his unsparing recollection, he confesses to many dislikes: exclamation points, award ceremonies, any aphorisms that come with self-help, online mobs ignoring things like due process, especially in the case of Woody Allen — part of the joy of the book is reading about his various vendettas and the origins of his excellent taste in food, art, film and theater, all relayed with his acerbic voice and natural gift for storytelling.  

The book starts with a quote from George Orwell: “Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful.” Keeping with that maxim, McNally begins with his suicide attempt in 2018 on the heels of a debilitating stroke. Then he takes the reader through the story of an underdog made good, with all the chip and insecurity that come from humble beginnings. He vividly traces his poor, working-class childhood in postwar London, early success as an actor on stage in London, and a pilgrimage on the Hippie Trail to Afghanistan. He finally lands in the shabby boho downtown of New York in the late Seventies. He gets into the restaurant business at the bottom, starting as an oyster shucker before moving to the front of the house. His unlikely run of success began with the opening of the classic bistro Odeon in New York in the 1980s and a string of hot restaurants followed, until they didn’t. Along the way, there’s friendships with public intellectuals like Oliver Sacks and Christopher Hitchens, actor and director Jonathan Miller, Conde Nast doyenne Anna Wintour, and many more. To reveal anything else would be unfair to any future reader. Rolling Stone corresponded with McNally recently to ask him a few questions about his life and times. (Talking remains difficult for him post-stroke.) 

In many ways the book is a love letter to New York. Do you miss the grittier city of yore?
New York thrives on change. Nothing ages a man more than longing for the past.

You write a lot about the pain of growing up working class in England. Do you worry about the class system seeping into New York and America? It was a lot more fun and easier to be broke in downtown NYC in the Seventies than it is today, for example.  
I’d never say that downtown New York was more fun in the Seventies than today. Whether it’s currently Greenpoint, Brooklyn, or Ridgewood, Queens, every generation has its equivalent of Seventies downtown New York. 

Have you witnessed America becoming a more calcified class system?  
The fact that America’s three richest men, Musk, Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg were so eager to attend Trump’s inauguration doesn’t bode well for this country.

You wandered down the famous Hippie Trail from Europe all the way to Afghanistan. Such a trip would be unimaginable, expensive, and dangerous today. What have we lost, with the passing of that freewheeling Bohemian youth culture?
The impetus to travel overland to Afghanistan at 19 came from a need — for want of a better phrase — to discover something within myself, not to discover Afghanistan. Nowadays, it would perhaps be too dangerous to travel overland alone from London to Kathmandu as I did in 1970. But if you’re young and in need of spiritual guidance — as I was at the time — the country you travel to isn’t important. It’s spending time alone and putting effort into reflection that makes the journey worthwhile.

I loved your many rants, especially about exclamation points and emojis. Do your children agree with you?
I can’t tell. Although I’ve received texts from them with the occasional exclamation point, I can’t remember receiving a text from any of them with an emoji. That would bother me more than if they came bottom of the class. 

I was eating at a fancy restaurant the other day and some influencer ladies were taking pictures of their food with their phones, using a handheld light to enhance the images. I wanted to snatch their phones and scream at them but didn’t. What is the appropriate response by restaurant staff and patrons to such behavior?
To take a hammer to the phone and to smash it into tiny particles. And then do the same to the guest.

One of the more depressing scenes in a restaurant is seeing a couple on a date both staring at their phones and not engaging with each other. What do you think your friend Oliver Sacks would have made of this sort of thing?  
Being the most compassionate man imaginable, Oliver would probably have paid for their dinner.

You were friends with the author and famous contrarian Christopher Hitchens. What do you think he’d make of this political moment? 
Hitchens, who was an avid supporter of Palestinian rights — as I most certainly am — would have hated Trump and Douglas Murray, the British neoconservative political commentator, with equal measure. By the way, supporting Palestinian rights doesn’t mean I support Hamas — far from it — or that I’m antisemetic. I worked the land in Israel for a year of my life, I’m part Jewish, and a whole slew of my friends are kibbutzniks. I care about Palestinian rights in the same way I care about Irish rights or Israeli rights.

What’s the best advice you ever received and who gave it and when?
Never believe anything until it’s been officially denied. I forget who said it, but it becomes truer every day. 

Given the title of your book, how does one live with regret? 
The same way one lives with imperfections. To live is to make mistakes. To be conscious of one’s regrets is proof of having lived an examined life.

You are an incredibly hard critic of yourself in these pages. Was that difficult to put on paper? 
Not after my suicide attempt.

Were you being too harsh?
Not harsh enough, to be honest.

You write beautifully about bicycling trips that seem to have been a fun escape and release of pressure for you in middle age. LeBron James has talked about being poor and the freedom a bike allowed him. 
The reason why I never had a bicycle before I left home was because my mother wouldn’t allow it. Because my mother had forbidden it, I was always desperate to ride a bike. I learned to ride one at eight or nine and from my twenties onwards bicycles symbolized absolute freedom like nothing else.

What advice would you give the younger you? 
Never take advice from anyone who seems pleased to give it.

What skill from working in theater helped you in running a restaurant most?
Lighting for sure.

The front of the house and the kitchen crew are often at odds. What’s the best way to diffuse conflict?
The best way to diffuse it is to hire people who listen to reason. Who understands that — to quote John Donne — “no man is an island, entire of itself.”

I have eaten at many of your restaurants, many times, and never had a bad experience. In fact, I’m always struck by the consistency at all of the McNally joints. What’s the trick to keeping standards so high?
I’m happy to hear you’ve never had a bad experience at one of my places, but I don’t believe that’s true for most people. Running my restaurant is getting the balance right between three things: standard, consistency, and volume. Having consistently high standards isn’t so hard when you’re doing 30 covers a night, but it’s much harder when you’re doing 500 covers.

The restaurant scene in New York of the 1970s and 1980s was rife with cocaine and alcohol abuse. Yet, in your book, it doesn’t really get much of a mention. How did you avoid that pitfall of the industry? 
Because I’ve never taken a single recreational drug since one disastrous attempt to smoke marijuana in 1970, I’m not really familiar with the drug scene. Not even one under my nose, if you’ll excuse my unintended pun.

This book is wildly entertaining and filled with hard-won lessons. And writing seems in some ways to have helped save your life. So, what are you planning to write next? 
Probably my obituary.

What would you order for a last meal?
Pasta con le sarde. (Sicilian pasta with sardines, pine nuts, fennel, raisins, toasted bread crumbs, and anchovies.)