Keith McNally’s new memoir, “I Regret Almost Everything,” begins at the lowest point of his life, the moment he tried to end it.
In 2018, nearly two years after a pair of strokes ravaged his body and wrecked his marriage, he locked his bedroom door, swallowed a lethal combination of pills, and waited to die. When he woke up — discovered by his son George, who spotted him through a window — he was in the hospital and bound for a psychiatric facility.
A lot has happened to him, and his business, since then. His restaurants closed during the coronavirus pandemic, then reopened in a flurry of social-media attention that felt like a reawakening of sorts for downtown Manhattan. One restaurant, Augustine, shut down for good in 2020; another, Minetta Tavern D.C., opened in 2024. And Mr. McNally became a social media star himself, via his droll, candid and provocative Instagram posts.
Now it’s March 2025, and a thoroughly engaged Mr. McNally, 73, is presiding over a morning meeting at Balthazar, his buzziest restaurant.
Some topics on the menu: people who pretend to be celebrities to get reservations. The 46 bottles of Champagne left over from election night, when Mr. McNally planned to hand out free glasses to celebrate the Kamala Harris victory that never came. A recent incident in which a server had to shield Anna Wintour, a Balthazar regular, from a gaggle of civilians wielding cellphones.
That point prompts some good-natured anecdotage about Ms. Wintour’s talent for inviting attention while exuding an “I-want-to-be-alone” froideur. A manager describes the time he saw a star-struck preteen girl approach her outside the restaurant. “Are you Anna Wintour?” the girl asked. “No,” Ms. Wintour replied.
The conversation is anarchic, risqué and serious all at once, much like Mr. McNally. A lot of the focus is on customer service: how to cosset regulars, but also how to make the nonfamous feel welcome — a McNally obsession. “If there’s a group of people waiting at the door, always go talk to the ones at the back of the line,” he tells the staff.
Hotel Bellhop, Factory Worker, Oyster Shucker
The title of his book immediately raises the question: What doesn’t Mr. McNally regret?
“I don’t regret lots of things,” he said. “But I can’t bear it when people say they have no regrets. I really don’t understand how that could be true.”
Interwoven with the story of his stroke and recovery is the story of his remarkably rich life, full of improbable turns: his working-class childhood in London; his early jobs as a hotel bellhop, factory worker and teenage actor, among other things; his move to Manhattan at 24; and his trajectory from oyster shucker to film director manqué to celebrated restaurateur, raconteur and provocateur.
Famous people — Tom Stoppard, Oliver Sachs, Patti Smith, Robert Mapplethorpe — waft in and out, as does the English playwright Alan Bennett, his great lifelong friend. Mr. McNally reveals that when he was 18 and Mr. Bennett 35, the two had a brief romantic relationship after he appeared in Mr. Bennett’s play “Forty Years On” in the West End.
Mr. Bennett encouraged him to write the memoir, but was not pleased with his decision to include their relationship, Mr. McNally said. “Alan’s 91 this month, so I really hope we can patch things up soon,” he said.
(Mr. Bennett is so private that he once responded to a query about whether he was gay by saying, “That’s like asking someone who had just crawled across the Sahara Desert whether they preferred Malvern or Perrier water.” He did not respond to emails seeking comment.)
By contrast, Mr. McNally is happy to discuss his sexuality. “I’ve no qualms about sleeping with another man,” he said, “but the last time I felt an inkling of desire for a man was 55 years ago.”
He began the book while undergoing psychiatric treatment at McLean Hospital in Massachusetts after his suicide attempt. Once he started, he could not stop, drawing on informal notes he’s been keeping for decades.
The strokes were precipitated by a prolonged convulsive coughing fit — opening new restaurants always brings on coughing attacks for him, he says in the book — that tore an artery in his neck and restricted blood flow to his brain. Though his mind is as sharp as ever, the physical consequences have been grievous. He is weak down his right side, uses a cane to walk, depends on an aide to help him shower and has had to retrain his left hand to take over from his once-dominant right hand.
(Full disclosure: My ex-husband also had a stroke, and wrote a book about it; I met Mr. McNally a few years ago when he read the book and invited me for coffee.)
Cruellest of all, perhaps, is how the stroke muddied and garbled his voice, so that this most verbally playful of men cannot always make himself understood. Instagram has been a godsend, he said, giving him a new voice, along with an audience of around 148,000 followers.
“It’s really odd and frustrating when I’ve got something to say and I just can’t say it,” Mr. McNally said. “In my more subdued moments, I find the whole process — the day in, day out relying on other people — quite humiliating.” But, he added, “I try not to dwell on it.”
‘Everybody’s on Keith’s List’
In an interview in his SoHo apartment, Mr. McNally is meant to be talking about himself, but he’d rather talk about almost anything else: Neil Young’s songs, George Orwell’s essays, Guy de Maupassant’s short stories, El Greco’s painting of St. Jerome at the Frick Museum, the beauty of the phrase “default to kindness” as an organizing principle in romantic relationships, the birds that have converged at the bird feeders on his terrace, singing their noisy songs of spring.
“Keith has a boundless curiosity and is interested in just about everything,” said Lorne Michaels, a close friend since the early days of “Saturday Night Live,” when he and the cast used to hang out at One Fifth, the restaurant where Mr. McNally worked his way up to general manager in the 1970s.
One Fifth was also where Mr. McNally met his first ex-wife, Lynn Wagenknecht, with whom he went on to open Odeon and other restaurants. (He now owns Balthazar, Morandi and the Minetta Taverns in New York and Washington, and is a consultant at Pastis.)
Mr. McNally and Ms. Wagenknecht share three children and remain good friends. He has two children with his second ex-wife, Alina, but they’re not speaking after a bitter divorce, as he explains in the book. “I would give anything to be friends with Alina, but so far she’s not interested,” he said.
His apartment, a rental that he shared with his two youngest children until “they couldn’t take my messy habits and loud music,” he said, has been lovingly put together, partly with materials smuggled into the building in briefcases to avoid the landlord’s scrutiny. He’s found most of his furniture and art himself, over many years.
“He has impeccable taste and if he doesn’t like something, he’ll just rip it out and say, ‘Do it again,’” said the architectural designer Ian McPheely, who has worked with Mr. McNally for more than three decades. “He often disagrees with people, but unlike most people, he always gives them a second chance.”
Mr. McNally’s Instagram followers have front row seats from which to observe his robust approach to disagreement. In 2021, for instance, he attacked an old friend, the former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, for failing to show up after booking a table for 12 at Morandi.
“Perhaps, being something of a social bigwig, Mr. Carter thinks he is above having to cancel restaurant reservations,” Mr. McNally wrote on Instagram. In response, Mr. Carter donated money to the restaurant’s tip pool and called the post a “deranged rant.”
They made up in March, when Mr. McNally posted a nostalgic message and admitted that “I still like the bastard.”
Mr. Carter, who recently published his own memoir, sent Mr. McNally a warm email, to which Mr. McNally replied, “Your kindness has prompted me to resubscribe to Air Mail,” a reference to Mr. Carter’s digital newsletter.
“Keith hasn’t really changed all that much,” Mr. Carter wrote in an email. “Still cranky, funny, literate and very good at what he does best: build and operate restaurants.”
But not every recipient of the McNally crankiness has fared as well.
He called Lauren Sánchez, Jeff Bezos’s fiancée, “revolting-looking.” Posting a photo of the football player Travis Kelce dressed in a louche bell-bottomed outfit, he wrote that when he saw Mr. Kelce’s “dandified (and Taylor-made)” get-up, “I knew his team would get slaughtered” in the Super Bowl. Most notably, he called the British actor James Corden “a tiny cretin of a man,” saying Mr. Corden had mistreated his staff several times, once in an incident involving an omelet.
The Corden kerfuffle made its way to the British tabloids, brought Mr. McNally thousands of new Instagram followers and left him “intoxicated” with power, he says in the book. “For someone who’s hyperconscious of humiliation since suffering a stroke, it now seems monstrous that I didn’t consider the humiliation I was subjecting Corden to,” he writes.
This is another trait of Mr. McNally’s: lacerating self-analysis, paired with knowing humor.
“I’m not being coy,” he said. “I don’t hate myself, but I see through myself.”
To his staff, Mr. McNally is known for being engaged, collaborative and exacting: correcting their grammar in emails to customers, noticing tiny glitches in the lighting, keeping abreast of problems in the service (and in customers’ behavior).
“He notices every single detail, and it forces you to bring everything up to a higher level,” said Zouheir Louhaichy, Balthazar’s head maître d’ and a familiar figure in the McNally Instagram universe. But, unusually in the punishing restaurant business, he goes out of his way to make his employees feel valued.
Mr. Louhaichy, who started working at Balthazar when it opened, in 1997, once overheard Mr. McNally talking about him to a friend. “He said, ‘He’s working with me,’ not ‘He’s working for me,’” Mr. Louhaichy said.
Mr. McNally brings a sense of racy fun to his restaurants, offering a free glass of Champagne to solo diners at Balthazar, for instance. This can sometimes complicate matters for the staff, as when he announced in 2023 that he would provide free lasagna to customers at Morandi on Sundays after 5 p.m. for a month.
“Sometimes he doesn’t tell us what he’s doing,” said John Boy, a longtime employee who works as the assistant reservations manager, among other things. “People were cheating the system by coming in for brunch and staying until dinner.”
Mr. McNally has also been perhaps too liberal in disseminating his restaurants’ special reservations number, which gives priority treatment to customers ranked by three categories of importance — A, AA and AAA. The lowest category, A, now encompasses tens of thousands of people, John Boy said.
“A lot of people say, ‘We’re on Keith’s list,’ but sometimes it seems like everybody’s on Keith’s list,” he said.
Love to Hate
Mr. McNally’s suicide attempt, now eight years ago, was not a cry for help, he said, but a genuine desire for oblivion. “I really didn’t want to be here,” he said. Similarly, his subsequent embrace of life was an active decision rather than a default position. “Partly it was that I didn’t want my kids to see me that way,” he said. Hauntingly, he added, “someone told me that the children of people who kill themselves have a higher rate of suicide.”
What animates him are the things he loves — but also the things that make him furious.
He gave some examples (and there are more in his book). Hypocrisy. President Trump and how he treated the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, in the Oval Office. The “really nasty” article Michael Wolff wrote in 2013 about Christopher Hitchens, whom Mr. McNally loved. Self-regarding puffery. Pomposity. The word “restaurateur.”
Above all, he added, he hates phoniness and pretension and hopes that’s not how he comes across.
“My biggest fear is being too full of myself,” he said.
Sarah Lyall is a writer at large for The Times, writing news, features and analysis across a wide range of sections.
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