Latest news with #Balthazar
Eater
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Eater
Keith McNally's Memoir Has Been Optioned by ‘SNL' Creator for Screen Adaptation
Balthazar was already a celebrity magnet, but now the story of its making might be getting the Hollywood treatment. Hot off the success of New York City restaurateur Keith McNally's memoir, I Regret Almost Everything , the Hollywood Reporter breaks news that his longtime friend, Saturday Night Live creator and executive producer Lorne Michaels, who is mentioned throughout the book, optioned it. This means that the book might be adapted into a movie or miniseries — full circle for McNally, who has made films himself. Maybe the last scene will be soundtracked by Taylor Swift's 'All Too Well (10 Minute Version),' per McNally's preference. Brooklyn restaurant's renovation break Fort Greene wine bar restaurant Margot is taking a renovation break this month. An Instagram announcement shared that the restaurant, which opened in May 2023, will spruce up its space and revamp its menu (again). It'll be closed from Monday, June 16, through Sunday, June 29, and will reopen with a party on Monday, June 30. Meanwhile, rumor is the co-owners, Halley Chambers and Kip Green, are working on signing a new lease in the West Village, an Instagram attached to their bio lists the restaurant name as Cleo. Wood-fire pop-up comes to Upper West Side Chef Justin Smillie, an Il Buco alum, is bringing his wood-fire pop-up Slow Fires to Upper West Side restaurant the Milling Room this month. He'll serve up wood-fired pizza, vegetables, and meats. It takes place Thursday, June 5 through Sunday, June 8, and again from Tuesday, June 10 through Sunday, June 15, from 4:30 to 9:30 p.m. Sign up for our newsletter.
Daily Mail
28-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
James Corden's restaurateur nemesis claims he had whirlwind romance with Diane Sawyer in bizarre post
British restaurateur Keith McNally shared a bizarre social media post claiming that he had a 'whirlwind love affair' with famed television journalist, Diane Sawyer. His rep has since clarified that the allegations are 'not true' to Page Six after he initially joked 'what happened in London [between them] STAYS in London.' On Wednesday, the I Regret Almost Everything author, who famously banned James Corden from celebrity hotspot Balthazar, claimed Sawyer 'was the first American' he 'ever slept with.' 'I had dinner last night at Diane Sawyer's apartment. It was an anniversary of sorts,' he alleged. 'Diane and I had first met in London 53 years ago TO THE DAY. (May the 27th 1972.) I was 20 at the time and had just returned to London after having lived in Afghanistan, India and Kathmandu. Diane was living in Washington DC but had come to London for a ten day vacation with a couple of girlfriends.' He continued: 'We met at the theatre. By chance, we were sitting next to each other at a production of Tom Stoppard's play Jumpers. I was alone and Diane was with her two girlfriends.' From A-list scandals and red carpet mishaps to exclusive pictures and viral moments, subscribe to the DailyMail's new showbiz newsletter to stay in the loop. McNally then recalled Diane asking to 'borrow' his theatre program and asking his thoughts on the play during intermission. Before the play began, he said Diane asked if she could 'borrow' his theatre program and, during intermission, asked him what he thought of the play. 'The play was too intellectual for me and I hadn't understood a word, but pretended to know it backwards,' he wrote. 'One of Diane's friends mentioned that I'd got the characters mixed up and I blushed and felt like an idiot.' McNally proceeded to reveal that Sawyer, who he described as 'stunningly attractive' and a few years older than him, took pity on him 'and said something to make' him feel 'better' about himself. 'When the play ended, Diane asked me if I wanted to join them for dinner. I really wanted to join them but couldn't afford it and hesitated. Understanding my predicament, Diane lied and said the dinner was already paid for,' he detailed in his post. He concluded the post by writing: 'Diane and I had a whirlwind love affair. It only lasted a week but we became best friends for life. Even though I'm really happy that we're best friends I sometimes wonder what would have happened if we'd stayed together.' Shortly after the post began to make headlines, McNally's rep confirmed to Page Six that his story was completely fictitious. The alleged encounter would have been 14 years before she met her longtime husband Mike Nichols, who passed away in 2014. At that time, McNally was also single and had yet to marry. has reached out to McNally and Sawyer's representatives, but have not heard back, at this time. In October 2022, McNally made headlines after banning Corden from his restaurant. At the time, he claimed on Instagram that the talk show host had been rude to his staff several times: berating them over a hair in his food and demanding free drinks during the summer. Additionally, James had allegedly furiously reprimanded the waiters over an omelet he was unhappy with. The first incident in June allegedly came after the comedian found a hair in his meal. According to staff, who were 'very apologetic,' the star allegedly declared: 'Get us another round of drinks this second. And also take care of all of our drinks so far. This way I [won't] write any nasty reviews in yelp or anything like that.' McNally said that in October, there was more trouble when Corden came in for brunch with his wife Julia Carey and complained about 'a little bit of egg white' in her egg yolk omelet. He then allegedly began 'yelling like crazy' when they made a new one but served it with fries instead of a salad. The post claimed James told the server: 'You can't do your job! You can't do your job! Maybe I should go into the kitchen and cook the omelet myself.' The couple received a free glass of Champagne and apologies, but the server 'was very shaken.' Four hours after announcing the ban to his 87,000 Instagram followers, McNally promptly reversed it, saying he had received a call from Corden apologizing. In a later post, the fiery restaurateur admitted that he felt 'really sorry' for Corden. McNally detailed the incident in his memoir, which was released earlier this month. 'By exposing Corden's abuse, it appeared as though I was defending a principle, when all I was doing was seeking the approval of my young Balthazar staff,' he said. McNally continued: 'Corden called me four times the day the post came out, each time asking me to please delete it. On the last call he sounded desperate.' 'Relishing my hold over someone so famous, I told him I wouldn't delete it. Like a little dictator, I was intoxicated with the power I'd received.' Strangely though, Keith has confessed that he didn't see the incident unfold with his own eyes and instead had posted on behalf of his staff members' accounts. '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 added. 'Especially as I hadn't personally seen the incident I so vividly described on Instagram. 'I'm not suggesting Corden didn't deserve the backlash from my post. (The b------ probably did.) 'I'm just saying I didn't see the incident I wrote about that, to some degree, jeopardized his career.' Balthazar, located at 80 Spring Street in the SoHo area of Manhattan, has become wildly popular over the last two decades. It has been visited by a slew of A-list names including Anna Wintour, Zoey Deutch, Sienna Miller, Jared Leto, Mary-Kate Olsen, Tom Hiddleston, and Meryl Streep - to name a few.
Yahoo
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘I Wasn't Harsh Enough': Restaurateur Keith McNally on His Confessional New Memoir
Balthazar, Pastis, Minetta Tavern, and Morandi are just some of the transformative, wildly successful and famous Manhattan restaurants Keith McNally has opened and run for decades. Each room imparts a promise of louche, sophisticated cool along with a memorable and delicious meal. 'The Restaurateur Who Invented Downtown' the New York Times once called him, a blurb that resides on the cover of McNally's brilliant new memoir, I Regret Almost Everything. The book is a must-read for anyone who cares about the restaurant scene of the last 40 years — or just wants to hear a worldy raconteur tell the story of an epic life, full of feuds and ups and downs, with brutal candor. Fittingly, McNally admits to hating the word restaurateur, among quite a few other things he loathes. In his unsparing recollection, he confesses to many dislikes: exclamation points, award ceremonies, any aphorisms that come with self-help, online mobs ignoring things like due process, especially in the case of Woody Allen — part of the joy of the book is reading about his various vendettas and the origins of his excellent taste in food, art, film and theater, all relayed with his acerbic voice and natural gift for storytelling. More from Rolling Stone These New York City Lawmakers Want Kehlani and Noname's Shows Uncanceled First Kehlani's, Now Noname's SummerStage Show Is Canceled The Roots, Soccer Mommy, and More Lead 2025 SummerStage Concerts Across NYC The book starts with a quote from George Orwell: 'Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful.' Keeping with that maxim, McNally begins with his suicide attempt in 2018 on the heels of a debilitating stroke. Then he takes the reader through the story of an underdog made good, with all the chip and insecurity that come from humble beginnings. He vividly traces his poor, working-class childhood in postwar London, early success as an actor on stage in London, and a pilgrimage on the Hippie Trail to Afghanistan. He finally lands in the shabby boho downtown of New York in the late Seventies. He gets into the restaurant business at the bottom, starting as an oyster shucker before moving to the front of the house. His unlikely run of success began with the opening of the classic bistro Odeon in New York in the 1980s and a string of hot restaurants followed, until they didn't. Along the way, there's friendships with public intellectuals like Oliver Sacks and Christopher Hitchens, actor and director Jonathan Miller, Conde Nast doyenne Anna Wintour, and many more. To reveal anything else would be unfair to any future reader. Rolling Stone corresponded with McNally recently to ask him a few questions about his life and times. (Talking remains difficult for him post-stroke.) In many ways the book is a love letter to New York. Do you miss the grittier city of yore?New York thrives on change. Nothing ages a man more than longing for the past. You write a lot about the pain of growing up working class in England. Do you worry about the class system seeping into New York and America? It was a lot more fun and easier to be broke in downtown NYC in the Seventies than it is today, for example. I'd never say that downtown New York was more fun in the Seventies than today. Whether it's currently Greenpoint, Brooklyn, or Ridgewood, Queens, every generation has its equivalent of Seventies downtown New York. Have you witnessed America becoming a more calcified class system? The fact that America's three richest men, Musk, Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg were so eager to attend Trump's inauguration doesn't bode well for this country. You wandered down the famous Hippie Trail from Europe all the way to Afghanistan. Such a trip would be unimaginable, expensive, and dangerous today. What have we lost, with the passing of that freewheeling Bohemian youth culture?The impetus to travel overland to Afghanistan at 19 came from a need — for want of a better phrase — to discover something within myself, not to discover Afghanistan. Nowadays, it would perhaps be too dangerous to travel overland alone from London to Kathmandu as I did in 1970. But if you're young and in need of spiritual guidance — as I was at the time — the country you travel to isn't important. It's spending time alone and putting effort into reflection that makes the journey worthwhile. I loved your many rants, especially about exclamation points and emojis. Do your children agree with you?I can't tell. Although I've received texts from them with the occasional exclamation point, I can't remember receiving a text from any of them with an emoji. That would bother me more than if they came bottom of the class. I was eating at a fancy restaurant the other day and some influencer ladies were taking pictures of their food with their phones, using a handheld light to enhance the images. I wanted to snatch their phones and scream at them but didn't. What is the appropriate response by restaurant staff and patrons to such behavior?To take a hammer to the phone and to smash it into tiny particles. And then do the same to the guest. One of the more depressing scenes in a restaurant is seeing a couple on a date both staring at their phones and not engaging with each other. What do you think your friend Oliver Sacks would have made of this sort of thing? Being the most compassionate man imaginable, Oliver would probably have paid for their dinner. You were friends with the author and famous contrarian Christopher Hitchens. What do you think he'd make of this political moment? Hitchens, who was an avid supporter of Palestinian rights — as I most certainly am — would have hated Trump and Douglas Murray, the British neoconservative political commentator, with equal measure. By the way, supporting Palestinian rights doesn't mean I support Hamas — far from it — or that I'm antisemetic. I worked the land in Israel for a year of my life, I'm part Jewish, and a whole slew of my friends are kibbutzniks. I care about Palestinian rights in the same way I care about Irish rights or Israeli rights. What's the best advice you ever received and who gave it and when?Never believe anything until it's been officially denied. I forget who said it, but it becomes truer every day. Given the title of your book, how does one live with regret? The same way one lives with imperfections. To live is to make mistakes. To be conscious of one's regrets is proof of having lived an examined life. You are an incredibly hard critic of yourself in these pages. Was that difficult to put on paper? Not after my suicide attempt. Were you being too harsh?Not harsh enough, to be honest. You write beautifully about bicycling trips that seem to have been a fun escape and release of pressure for you in middle age. LeBron James has talked about being poor and the freedom a bike allowed him. The reason why I never had a bicycle before I left home was because my mother wouldn't allow it. Because my mother had forbidden it, I was always desperate to ride a bike. I learned to ride one at eight or nine and from my twenties onwards bicycles symbolized absolute freedom like nothing else. What advice would you give the younger you? Never take advice from anyone who seems pleased to give it. What skill from working in theater helped you in running a restaurant most? Lighting for sure. The front of the house and the kitchen crew are often at odds. What's the best way to diffuse conflict?The best way to diffuse it is to hire people who listen to reason. Who understands that — to quote John Donne — 'no man is an island, entire of itself.' I have eaten at many of your restaurants, many times, and never had a bad experience. In fact, I'm always struck by the consistency at all of the McNally joints. What's the trick to keeping standards so high?I'm happy to hear you've never had a bad experience at one of my places, but I don't believe that's true for most people. Running my restaurant is getting the balance right between three things: standard, consistency, and volume. Having consistently high standards isn't so hard when you're doing 30 covers a night, but it's much harder when you're doing 500 covers. The restaurant scene in New York of the 1970s and 1980s was rife with cocaine and alcohol abuse. Yet, in your book, it doesn't really get much of a mention. How did you avoid that pitfall of the industry? Because I've never taken a single recreational drug since one disastrous attempt to smoke marijuana in 1970, I'm not really familiar with the drug scene. Not even one under my nose, if you'll excuse my unintended pun. This book is wildly entertaining and filled with hard-won lessons. And writing seems in some ways to have helped save your life. So, what are you planning to write next? Probably my obituary. What would you order for a last meal?Pasta con le sarde. (Sicilian pasta with sardines, pine nuts, fennel, raisins, toasted bread crumbs, and anchovies.) Best of Rolling Stone Every Super Bowl Halftime Show, Ranked From Worst to Best The United States of Weed Gaming Levels Up
Yahoo
06-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
NYC Restaurateur Reveals Trump Was An Annoying Guest: 'He Wasn't Very Bright'
New York City restaurateur Keith McNally says President Donald Trump once frequently dined at his famed Balthazar eatery, and in his newly published memoir, 'I Regret Almost Everything,' he recalled the former real estate tycoon behaving rather unscrupulously. McNally told People in an interview Tuesday that Trump became a regular for two years after the restaurant opened in 1997. In a book excerpt published by the outlet, the proprietor recalled trying to rent some real estate from Trump — long before his polarizing pivot into politics. 'Even though I missed meeting Henry VIII by four hundred years, I did meet his modern-day equivalent, Donald Trump,' wrote McNally, per People. 'Walking through a series of overdecorated spaces, we passed one that was noticeably less gaudy than the others.' 'I asked the Don if that restaurant space was also for rent,' he continued. ''No, that one's taken. I guaranteed it to someone else a month ago.' … There was a pause before Trump added with a smile: 'But just because it's guaranteed doesn't meant mean it's locked in.'' McNally ultimately decided not to lease the space; Trump's apparent willingness to renege on his guarantee, meanwhile, presumably sounds familiar to former campaign sites and untold American voters who've experienced just how flimsy a Trump promise can be. The president did, after all, refuse to acknowledge that he has a duty to uphold the U.S. Constitution — which he vowed to do as part of his presidential oath of office — when asked during his 'Meet the Press' interview Sunday about due process rights and the mistaken deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Keith McNally (left) told People that Donald Trump "wasn't too bright," but that he was "very decent" to him. Left: Erik T. Kaiser/; Right: Alex Brandon/Associated Press McNally has worked in the restaurant business for decades and opened many famous New York eateries, including The Odeon, Pastis and Minetta Tavern. He famously once banned former CBS talk show host James Corden for berating Balthazar's waitstaff. The restaurateur slammed Corden as 'a tiny Cretin of a man' in a viral Instagram post in 2022, and even though he buried the hatchet shortly after, McNally described Trump's demeanor in the late 1990s more favorably Tuesday than he previously described Corden's. 'Even then he seemed like a caricature of a rich, pushy New Yorker with diabolical taste,' McNally told People. 'But he wasn't offensive. In fact, he was very decent to me.' 'All the same, he wasn't too bright,' he continued, 'and if someone had told me that one day he'd be President I'd have thought they were certifiable.' Related...
Yahoo
06-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
How the Best Restaurants Can Make You Feel
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. [Read: Dining out isn't what it used to be] 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.' [Read: Who wants to sit at a communal table?] 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. [Read: Why The Bear is so hard to watch] 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. Article originally published at The Atlantic
