A funny thing about food is that you don’t need to eat it to appreciate it. You can revisit David Gelb’s 2011 documentary, Jiro Dreams of Sushi, or his subsequent work on Chef’s Table, a docuseries that paired sweeping orchestral music with close-ups of food. You can witness the creation of elaborate bites on Top Chef, stan a tormented genius on The Bear, or browse images on Instagram of carefully plated culinary masterpieces. You will probably still want to eat it all, but this abundance of cultural attention makes the message clear: Chefs are artists worthy of devotion, because they can transform raw material into something sublime.
Restaurateurs are another matter. As the procurers of finances and managers of staff, they’re often seen as the hard-nosed businesspeople behind the whimsical auteurs. Yet the best of them are also auteurs, I would argue. They know how to create something special too: They are architects of the inexplicable, know-it-when-you-see-it thing called “vibe”—the warm sensation of being treated like a VIP, the collective energy of a roomful of loyal patrons, lighting that makes you think your date looks more attractive than ever. These joys don’t translate well to television or social media, and even if they did, there’s no guarantee the viewers would experience the same thing should they go on their own. The restaurateur is the director of a live theater performance—intimate, fleeting, and different every night. After you try a new restaurant, people typically ask, “How was the food?” I like to ask: “How did it make you feel?”
In New York, Keith McNally is the exception to the rule of restaurateur obscurity. Few people have been as recognized for their understanding of atmosphere as McNally, who chronicles his life and work in a new memoir, I Regret Almost Everything. For the cost of dining at his restaurants ($31 for salade Niçoise at Pastis, $29 for eggs Benedict at Balthazar), one could easily find much better food in the city. But to the question of whether they make you feel good, the answer is usually yes. On occasion, during the heyday of his restaurants, from the 1980s to the early 2000s, the most yes.
McNally’s vibes have been so irresistible to diners that, for better or for worse, they’ve reshaped where the city’s heart beats, helping turn sleepy neighborhoods into crucibles of spiraling rents. Pastis appeared on Sex and the City multiple times as a stand-in for all that’s thrilling about a night out in Manhattan; Carrie Bradshaw once referred to it as “the only restaurant that seemed to exist.” But the real trick of the McNally experience is its accessibility. Bathed in lighting that critics have called “McNally Gold” or a “fairytale glow,” you might feel as though your meal is already a wonderful memory. His restaurants are where Jude Law can brighten your breakfast meeting and Rihanna might enhance your date night, but because they typically have ample tables and walk-in bar seating, they are also readily available to you, the totally-normal-yet-especially-beautiful-tonight you. If anybody can make the case for the restaurateur as an artist, it’s the creator of this particular vibe.
Although McNally is a downright legend in New York, he is not a national household name. These days, he might be more broadly known for his deliberately provocative Instagram, where he’s gone viral for defenses of Woody Allen and jabs at James Corden. (He mentions these incidents in the book too, admitting that he exaggerated his Corden outrage.)
His restaurant work, meanwhile, is part of a dining-out culture that doesn’t get as much adulation as it once did. Following the coronavirus pandemic, fewer Americans want to eat outside their home. Since I started covering the restaurant industry nearly a decade ago, more people seem to be opting for fast-casual chains, takeout, delivery. Some critics argue that, because of this, the people who do still go to restaurants care more about ambience than ever, and that establishments are responding by making it a priority. I think this is true! Still, I can’t help but sense a hint of derision in the way this development is discussed. Such efforts to find a distinguishing aesthetic are analyzed as “branding” or good business sense rather than craft; the adjective sceney is rarely deployed as a compliment.
In his memoir, McNally doesn’t explicitly say that he considers his work to be an artistic endeavor, and when critics have compared him in the past to a director, he’s scoffed. (McNally, who had dreamed of being a filmmaker and did eventually make two movies, complained that when these projects debuted, “no movie reviewer ever compared them to restaurant dining rooms.”) But a lot has happened to him over the years: In 2016, McNally had a stroke that greatly impaired his speech and challenged his sense of self. He attempted suicide, and got divorced for a second time. All of his restaurants closed in the early days of COVID, and eventually, a couple of them shut down forever.
Reflecting on his near-death experience and its fallout seems to have shifted something in him. With the same self-deprecating voice he uses on Instagram, McNally’s memoir offers up the backstory on his style, and in doing so, it embraces his status as one of New York’s most influential creative minds. The book is filled with tales of the playwrights and writers and filmmakers who have inspired him, his obsessiveness in the pursuit of aesthetic perfection, and his perspective on restaurant service. It paints a portrait of the artist as a restaurateur, and shows how a singular point of view can translate to the world of dining.
His restaurants, for instance, are frequently decorated with objects described as “distressed.” The credit for this flourish, arguably responsible for decades of faux-antique decor and color-washed walls proliferating through American dining districts, goes in part to the British theater director Jonathan Miller, whom McNally met through the playwright Alan Bennett. Miller found everyday objects in junk shops and then displayed them in his home as if they were sculptures. Bennett was even more significant to the McNally aesthetic. The two of them dated—one of two gay relationships the restaurateur says he has had in his life—when the playwright was 35 and McNally was 18. Bennett introduced him to plays, books, paintings, and the art of home renovation. Once, Bennett stripped his own sitting room of decades of wallpaper and then applied wax and paint to plaster “until it turned an extraordinary deep mustard color,” McNally writes: “the same color I’ve been trying—mostly unsuccessfully—to reproduce on my restaurants’ walls for almost fifty years.”
McNally’s flair for heightening the ordinary pairs well with his canny ability to stage restaurants that are posh enough for celebrities yet homey enough for tourists. This insistence on approachability stems, he explains in the memoir, from his working-class background. He writes that he demands sensitivity from his servers when it comes to price: Always mention the cost of specials; never assume that you can keep the change from a customer paying cash. As for his background in lighting, McNally describes a succession of jobs he held earlier: running lights for a live production of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, managing a strip club, working as a manager at the once-legendary restaurant One Fifth. “Of course, seductive lighting doesn’t compensate for tasteless food or inept service,” he writes. “Likewise, extraordinary food, design and service never guarantee a successful restaurant. Nothing does except that strange indefinable: the right feel.” These are not the tips and tricks of a corporate honcho’s management book or the gauzy reminisces of a self-help sage; they are the experiences and deliberate choices that culminated in a fruitful creative career.
McNally is neither the only vibe master in the restaurant business nor the last. Plenty of newer restaurants treat dining out as not just a vehicle for sating hunger but also a source of moments to remember. The see-and-be-seen prime of Balthazar and Minetta Tavern is over; these sleek establishments continue to fill up, but the hottest of the hot young things have largely moved on to other parties. Like a buzzy play that ends up with a long Broadway run, his restaurants stay busy and still promise delights, but many dining devotees remember to revisit only when a cousin comes into town.
The restaurateur recognizes the ephemeral nature of his line of work, though he mostly nods to it while discussing other artists. He notes that Miller, the theater director, enjoyed much more fame than Bennett did for several decades but that Bennett’s published work is far better known today. “After a director dies, his or her specific staging can never be seen live again,” McNally writes. “After a writer dies, his or her books can be reread and plays restaged.” Nevertheless, he seems, after a period of serious crisis, to have made peace with his own impermanence: “Who’s to say that even if I did possess the talent to write plays that I’d be able to affect—even in the most superficial way—as many people as my restaurants appear to have done for nearly half a century?”
McNally is still breathing, as are his spots in New York, London, and Washington, D.C., some of which are run with the savvy Philadelphia restaurateur Stephen Starr. And his memoir, like Bennett’s scripts, will outlast a single evening out. A perfectly orchestrated meal creates the illusion of effortlessness; McNally’s book serves as an enduring reminder of the work and talent that go into creating such memories, and of the artists whose vision sets the scene.
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