Keith McNally regrets almost everything

I Regret Almost Everything

Keith McNally

Simon & Schuster, £25, pp320

Keith McNally is a famous New York restaurateur, owner of Minetta Tavern and Balthazar. Confusingly, his older brother Brian is also a famous New York restaurateur, former owner of Indochine. So both boys done good, given that they grew up in a prefab in Bethnal Green. But this book is about Keith.

It begins, discouragingly, with him having a disastrous stroke in November 2016, which left him with slurred speech and paralysis down his right side. “Fortunately my private parts still functioned but taking pleasure from this was like totalling a car and performing cartwheels because the windshield wipers still worked.” He had to learn to type with his left hand in order to write this book. It hops and skips through his life with very little sense of chronology but eventually we learn how the boy from Bethnal Green became a New York restaurateur taking in $80m a year.

He left school at 16 with one O-level and got a job as a bellboy at the London Hilton hotel. One day an American guest asked if he’d like to try out for a TV film he was producing, Mr Dickens of London, and McNally got the part of a street urchin, with Michael Redgrave as Dickens. He enjoyed being whisked by limousine from prefab to Pinewood and decided to become an actor. He had the advantage of looking about l2 when he was 16 and landed the title role in a production of The Winslow Boy. Then he was cast as one of the schoolboys in Alan Bennett’s Forty Years On, which ran for a year in the West End. “My relationship with Alan enriched my life in ways I find it hard to explain,” he says.

Bennett was then 35, McNally 18. The relationship was platonic at first but then not. “Sleeping with Alan felt like a natural progression of our friendship,” he reveals, a bombshell of sorts given that their affair was previously secret and Bennett would reportedly have preferred it to stay that way. He spent half the week at Bennett’s house in Gloucester Crescent, north London, and got to know Bennett’s friend and neighbour Jonathan Miller, who he thinks was a genius. But after a while he grew restless and decided to hitchhike to Kathmandu.

By the time he returned in late spring 1971 he was 20 and too old to be a boy actor. So he worked in Smithfield Market and then in a paint spraying factory in Wigan, which he found “oddly satisfying”. He returned to the theatre as a lighting man for The Rocky Horror Show and enjoyed the power it gave him to cut the lights if the actors spent too long taking curtain calls.

In l975 he moved to New York and loved it. He got a job as an oyster shucker at the fashionable restaurant One Fifth, and the owner quickly promoted him to maitre d’ and general manager. He hired his brother Brian as bartender and married one of the waitresses, Lynn Wagenknecht. Eventually the three of them decided to open their own 130-seat restaurant in Tribeca and Brian came up with the name, the Odeon. It was a roaring success from the beginning and has been full every night for almost half a century. Anna Wintour, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol and John Belushi were early fans, and Jay McInerney asked if he could use a photo of the Odeon for the cover of his first novel, Bright Lights, Big City. McNally was still only 29 when it opened and already a success.

The trouble is success is quite boring to read about, especially when he seems to open successful new restaurants and bars (Cafe Luxembourg, Nell’s Club, Pravda, Balthazar) practically every year. It is almost a relief when his 11th restaurant, a pizzeria, fails. He likes his restaurants to be busy and buzzy, and says the most depressing sight is married couples who eat without talking – they remind him of his parents. But he likes customers who eat alone, especially if they bring a book, and always sends them a complimentary glass of champagne. He tells his staff to make everyone feel welcome and also to expect to be treated politely themselves. He gained much kudos when he posted a story on Instagram about the actor James Corden – “ever the obnoxious customer” – being so rude to one of his waitresses that he reduced her to tears. Corden rang and begged him to delete it but he refused. He had set himself the aim of getting 100,000 followers on Instagram but was stuck at 58,000 till the Corden story rocketed him to 90,000.

At the time of his stroke, he was married to his second wife, Alina, but was still friends with his first wife, Lynn, who visited him often in hospital and in rehab. Alina was annoyed. She was even more annoyed when he decided they should live in the English countryside and bought a house in the Cotswolds: “Unstable marriages become miserable marriages when one’s living in the country.” She served divorce papers but agreed to come on a last family holiday at their house in Martha’s Vineyard. While there, he attempted suicide and was admitted to a famous psychiatric hospital, McLean, where he had psychotherapy for the first time. He’d refused it before because “I’m terrified of losing control”.

At this point he was still friends with Alan Bennett, who advised him to write everything down. Presumably that’s what got him started on I Regret Almost Everything but it’s a strangely disjointed and self-indulgent book. There’s good stuff here but it comes in fits and starts and lacks narrative control. It’s a pity Bennett didn’t also advise him to get a good editor, who could have excised some of the longueurs.

Photographs Corry Arnold, Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty

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