Good morning. It’s Monday. We’ll find out who won the $50,000 Gotham Book Prize. We’ll also see how, when Rudolph Giuliani was mayor in the 1990s, he arranged health care for a predecessor, John Lindsay.
Keith McNally, who wrote the best seller “I Regret Almost Everything,” regrets not winning a Pulitzer Prize on Monday — or a National Book Award in November. He said he hadn’t known that memoirs were eligible.
“If I’d been aware of this, I would have bribed the judges,” McNally said by email.
But McNally, who as a restaurateur created New York establishments like the Odeon, Balthazar and Cafe Luxembourg, has just been named winner of the Gotham Book Prize for 2026. Maybe he will laugh all the way to the bank. The Gotham Book Prize comes with a $50,000 award. The prize money from the Pulitzers is $15,000. A National Book Award winner receives $10,000. (And when I asked the obvious question — had he bribed the Gotham Book Prize judges — his answer was what I had expected: The line had been a joke.)
“I Regret Almost Everything” traces McNally’s successes and failures, likes and dislikes, including the word “restaurateur.” It’s too French and too pretentious, says McNally, who was born in working-class London, the son of a stevedore.
McNally arrived in New York in 1975, when he was in his early 20s. “Moving to New York City is one of the things I don’t regret — I love everything about New York,” he said.
And that was part of the appeal to the Gotham Book Prize judges, even though “I Regret Almost Everything” begins with McNally’s suicide attempt in 2018, after he survived two strokes that left his speech and movement impaired. The book “is very much a New York story,” said Bradley Tusk, one of the two longtime political operatives who created the prize in 2021. “It was almost like the nonfiction of a Jay McInerney book.”
More about McNally and McInerney in a moment. In New York the young McNally wound up working at One Fifth, a restaurant near Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village. Hired not to cook but to shuck oysters, he was repeatedly promoted, becoming the maître d’ and the general manager.
Along the way he collected friends who were fashionable and influential, like the “Saturday Night Live” producer Lorne Michaels and the magazine editor Anna Wintour. She was the only customer he ever cooked for, “although I made a hash of the eggs Benedict,” he wrote in “I Regret Almost Everything.”
When the Odeon opened in 1980, the first two nights were rocky, but the third night was “a restaurant owner’s dream.” And, as Steven Kurutz wrote in The New York Times in 2005, the Odeon became “the place where the go-go ’80s played out.” McNally’s other restaurants followed.
Tusk said that the judging for the Gotham Book Prize this year was unusual, compared with past years. “I Regret Almost Everything” got eight of the 12 judges’ votes in the first round. There will be an awards ceremony at the Museum of the City of New York on May 28.
“I like the idea of rewarding someone for being as self-aware and as accountable” as McNally sounds in “I Regret Almost Everything,” Tusk said. Also, he said, “the writing is good, the stories are good and the restaurants are fun.”
So why didn’t McNally become a writer when he got to New York?
“Lacked confidence,” McNally said by email. “Though I eventually wrote some mediocre articles and a couple of film scripts, it took a suicide attempt to give me the confidence to write unself-consciously.”
And McInerney? McNally said that he seldom saw him these days but had read his latest book, “See You on the Other Side,” the week it was published. Tusk said that he, too, had read “See You on the Other Side.” Referring to McInerney, Tusk said: “He has that challenge. He wrote one of the all-time great New York books, and it’s just impossible to ever get to that point again.”
But — as Tusk pointed out — McNally’s Odeon was on the cover of McInerney’s “Bright Lights, Big City.”
Weather
Expect mostly cloudy skies, a chance of rain and a high near 64. Tonight will be cloudy before clearing. Temperatures will near 48.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until Thursday (Solemnity of the Ascension).
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“NYC is full of old stuff, and I’m the one who is fixing it.” — Suleyka Henriquez, who with his wife, Stalyn, repairs apartment building intercoms, keeping buzzers and buttons working in old-fashioned analog systems that may not have been upgraded since the 1970s.
The latest Metro news
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A climate-friendly vision for straw houses: A Princeton University team designed a cottage made almost entirely of straw to showcase its potential as an alternative to bricks and timber. Straw captures and stores carbon dioxide.
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Redrawing political lines: Four states are considering drawing new congressional or judicial maps for partisan gain. Governors of New York and New Jersey have suggested they may join the map-drawing fray next year.
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One building’s evolution: A co-op down the street from Carnegie Hall was built for artists and later turned into offices. Now the space is being reborn as a luxury condominium.
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Opening a New York City restaurant: Follow the owners of Border Town, as they transition from a roving breakfast taco stand in Brooklyn to a brick-and-mortar cafe.
How Giuliani helped Lindsay get health benefits
The lawyer of former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said last week that he was applying for free medical care under a federal program for people who were exposed to toxins following the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.
He’s not the first former mayor to seek help on health care — and, as Alexander Nazaryan writes, Giuliani helped one of his predecessors, John Lindsay, get municipal health insurance coverage when he was in his 70s.
Giuliani became famous as a federal prosecutor whose tough-on-everything tactics were the antithesis of Lindsay’s liberalism.
But by the mid-1990s, Lindsay’s health was shaky. When Giuliani heard that Lindsay’s financial situation was too, he put their political differences aside — Lindsay had endorsed David Dinkins not once but both times he ran against Giuliani. Randy Mastro, a top Giuliani adviser, said that Giuliani had told his aides to find a path to help Lindsay.
Lindsay had spent eight years in city government, not long enough to be eligible for benefits once he stepped down.
The solution was to bring him back, in two largely ceremonial roles, one of which paid $25,000 a year, the other nothing. The appointments allowed Lindsay to enroll in a health care plan, the same as any other employee on the city payroll.
Lindsay died in 2000 at age 79 of complications from pneumonia and Parkinson’s disease. Giuliani went on to be heralded as “America’s Mayor” after the Sept. 11 attacks. But he later alienated many New Yorkers with his energetic support of Donald Trump and his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. And Giuliani, who was hospitalized with pneumonia earlier in the month, now faces financial troubles of his own: A $148 million judgment in a defamation suit brought by election workers prompted him to file for bankruptcy.
METROPOLITAN diary
Pretty peaches
Dear Diary:
I was walking down 79th Street when I heard a woman with a large coral-colored cockatoo on her shoulder say: “Excuse me. Can you hold my bird?”
I looked around. Was she talking to me?
She huffed at my two seconds of confusion.
“Just put your arm out!” she said.
I did, and while this woman answered her phone, her imposing bird with claws as big as my hands hopped onto my wrist, then sidled up my arm and onto my shoulder.
She was heavier than I expected — not quite like having a dog on my shoulder, but maybe a cat.
I wanted to look at her. It’s not every day you have a large bird sitting on you, but I was afraid that if I did, she might gouge out my eyeballs with her imposing beak.
I decided to fix my eyes on a nearby street sign and hope for the best. The bird told me her name was Peaches, that she was 7 years old and also that she was pretty.
My first thought was: Well, aren’t we a little full of ourselves? But then I caught myself. Good for you, Peaches, I thought. I wish I had your confidence.
I told Peaches I had an appointment and hoped her owner would get off the phone soon.
Then Peaches gripped my shoulder a little tighter with her claws and stretched the top of her body up and over my head so that I was wearing her like a pair of earmuffs.
“I love you,” she said.
We stayed in this magical bird hug for a minute or two before her owner whisked her off my shoulder with a halfhearted “thanks” and hurried away.
Peaches turned her head 180 degrees, seemed to look at me longingly and disappeared into the day.
— Eileen Kelly
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Tell us your New York story here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
Davaughnia Wilson and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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James Barron writes the New York Today newsletter, a morning roundup of what’s happening in the city.
The post He Created the Odeon. And Now He’s a Prizewinning Author. appeared first on New York Times.
