I REGRET ALMOST EVERYTHING, by Keith McNally
The restaurateur Keith McNally’s memoir, “I Regret Almost Everything,” is driven by his dislikes, as so many good books are. He loathes two of the first three words in the sentence above, for example. As he puts it in his perceptive and sharply entertaining book, “Not only am I saddled with a first name I can’t stand, I chose a profession with a name I dislike even more: restaurateur. Does a plumber call himself a plombier? Trust the French to come up with the most pretentious word in the dictionary. And just to make it extra difficult for us to pronounce, the bastards went and took the n out of the word.”
He hates bad lighting and arrogant maître d’s. Menus written entirely in French. Tables at which you are too far from your partner. Mastadonic wine lists. Most restaurants with no burger on the menu. Waiters who don’t announce the prices of the specials. Most dinner parties. (“There are few feelings of relief that compare to the first gulp of night air after leaving a dinner party prematurely.”) Peeing at a urinal with another man standing next to him. Elite food-world snobbery against big, bustling restaurants. Fickle landlords. Cat Stevens. Restaurants that close before midnight. The sanctimonious James Beard Awards — he threw his medal in the trash.
There’s plenty more, of course. Lingering too long in museums. Walls without art and rooms without books. Weddings. Rock concerts. Standing ovations. Clichés. Siblings, most of the time. (“It’s not only your mum and dad” who mess you up, he writes.) Sex with women who arrive with big suitcases. Direct sunlight — except when he’s sitting in the shade. Magnificent views. Halloween. New Year’s Eve. “Don Quixote.” Patti Smith (because she reduced a waitress to tears) and Drew Nieporent (because he is Drew Nieporent). Men who lie and say the days their children were born were the best of their lives. Instagram, even though he’s great on it. The successes of his rivals. The stroke that tore his life in two in 2016. Suffering — because it doesn’t make you stronger, “it makes you mean and petty.” Himself.
Beneath the surface chop, and the bohemian restaurant detritus, a story gets told. “I Regret Almost Everything” is about a working-class kid — his father was a stevedore — who grew up poor in the East End of London. McNally skipped college and drifted into acting. The theater director Jonathan Miller and the playwright Alan Bennett (with whom he had a sexual relationship) took him under their wings. They imparted to him an interest in culture and restaurants and design. For 50 years, he writes, he’s been chasing for his restaurants a certain deep mustard color he first saw on Bennett’s apartment walls.
When he tired of acting (he hates acting), he hit the hippie trail, hitchhiking and taking buses through India and Nepal. His shoulder-length hair and placid good looks — McNally still resembles both a Roman bust and an ’80s-era French leading man — did nothing to dampen his warm receptions. He arrived in New York in 1975, vaguely intending to make films, but he ended up, as most aspiring artists in this city do, working in restaurants.
He cut his teeth at One Fifth, now defunct, where he moved from oyster shucker to waiter to maître d’ to general manager. The restaurant was sophisticated, and it was a scene; McNally befriended Lorne Michaels, who’d bring the “Saturday Night Live” cast there. He met his first wife and future business partner, Lynn Wagenknecht, at One Fifth. He also befriended the young Anna Wintour, who changed his life by inviting him to Paris and touring him through that city’s best bistros and brasseries.
My favorite was a place called Chez Georges. I loved the smell of escargots drenched in butter and garlic, the look of the red banquettes, the scored mirrors, the handwritten menu, the waiters with their starched white, ankle-length aprons. Everything about the place stimulated me. Even the jug of pickled cornichons on the table.
He returned to New York determined to open his own version of a Parisian brasserie. He did so and more, redefining this city’s restaurant ethos as he moved along. Most were in gritty downtown neighborhoods. The Odeon, in Tribeca, opened in 1980. The then unknown Jay McInerney offered to pay McNally for the use of the restaurant’s signage, with the Twin Towers looming off to one side, on the cover of his novel “Bright Lights, Big City” (1984). McNally didn’t think the book would sell, so he let him use it for free.
Then came Café Luxembourg, on the Upper West Side, in 1983. The restaurant was named after the Polish-German intellectual and revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, but he misspelled her name. Then Nell’s, in 1986, “a nightclub for people who don’t like nightclubs.” Later came Balthazar, his Soho workhorse, which opened in 1997 and was almost named Brasserie Lafayette. Then the original Pastis in 1999.
McNally’s restaurant Schiller’s Liquor Bar, a warm (tiled floors, desilvered mirrors) but no-frills joint expressly for neighbors and walk-ins that opened in 2002 and closed in 2017, inspired one of Richard Price’s best and most distinctive novels, “Lush Life” (2008). The novel features the exterior of Schiller’s on its cover; the McNally character is named Harry Steele — he has “those dour baggy eyes like Serge Gainsbourg or Lou Reed.”
McNally lingers just as long on his failures — for example, Augustine, which was killed, he says, by a 2017 review in this newspaper, and Pulino’s, an upscale pizza place on the Bowery that fizzled expensively. He makes the restaurant world seem as dangerous as a Shakespearean court.
In large part, this is a stroke memoir. McNally’s speech and movement are still hampered. He wonders if this was “retribution for a life shot through with questionable behavior.” He also recounts a suicide attempt on Martha’s Vineyard in 2018. It’s a friendship memoir — he recounts his love for Oliver Sacks, Robert Hughes and Christopher Hitchens, among others. It’s a family memoir. McNally has five children from two marriages, and he admits he has been an imperfect father.
Against the wisdom of the ages, he says it was work, not family, that got him through his existential health crisis. (“When you’re sick, everyone bangs on about the importance of family.”) Perhaps not surprisingly, he adds — and he is nearly always this epigrammatical: “You’re never out of the woods with your own kids. Not even when you’re dead and buried.”
McNally opens his memoir with a quote from George Orwell: “Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.”
His book lives up to this credo, in a manner that gives it more soulfulness and more bottom, as the Brits like to call gravitas, than (let’s say) Graydon Carter’s recent memoir. Not a day goes by, he writes, when he does not fear an authority figure tapping him on the shoulder and saying, “McNally, you’re a fraud. We’re putting you on the next plane back to London.”
I REGRET ALMOST EVERYTHING | Keith McNally | Gallery Books | 303 pp. | $29.99
Dwight Garner has been a book critic for The Times since 2008, and before that was an editor at the Book Review for a decade.
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