Latest news with #BrightLights
Hamilton Spectator
05-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Hamilton Spectator
Book Review: Restauranteur Keith McNally opens up in candid memoir ‘I Regret Almost Everything'
Keith McNally has been charming New York City diners since he opened his first restaurant, The Odeon, in 1980, helping transform a then-derelict TriBeCa into a hotspot for the 'glitterati.' The Odeon's glowing neon sign was featured on the cover of Jay McInerney's 1984 novel 'Bright Lights, Big City,' and the restaurant was a regular hangout for celebrities from Andy Warhol to John Belushi. Nearly five decades and 19 restaurants later, McNally's Balthazar in SoHo, Minetta Tavern in New York and D.C., and other restaurants are still going strong. In his candid, funny and poignant memoir, 'I Regret Almost Everything,' McNally, 73, shows that he is, too. But it might not have been that way. The book opens with a 2018 suicide attempt, sparked by back pain, a crumbling marriage and the aftereffects of a 2016 stroke which left him with aphasia and a paralyzed right hand. Work — building and operating restaurants — helped keep him going. And with his speech distorted, he found a creative outlet in Instagram, where his filter-free screeds on everything — from dealing with his stroke to Balthazar's evening recap by staff — often go viral. 'In some ways, it was only after I lost my voice that I learned to speak my mind,' he writes. In his memoir, McNally charts his unlikely success story from a working-class teen actor raised in Bethnal Green, London, to being dubbed 'The Restaurateur Who Invented Downtown' in his heyday of the 1980s and '90s. His exacting eye for lighting and ambiance and charming touches in his restaurants — he sends a gratis glass of champagne to solo diners at Balthazar, and often filled the 'cheap' $15 carafe of wine at the now-defunct Schiller's with his finest bottles — have turned countless customers into regulars at his establishments. McNally's memoir lets readers sidle up to the bar and feel like regulars in his life, too. ___ AP book reviews:
San Francisco Chronicle
05-05-2025
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
Book Review: Restauranteur Keith McNally opens up in candid memoir 'I Regret Almost Everything'
Keith McNally has been charming New York City diners since he opened his first restaurant, The Odeon, in 1980, helping transform a then-derelict TriBeCa into a hotspot for the 'glitterati.' The Odeon's glowing neon sign was featured on the cover of Jay McInerney's 1984 novel 'Bright Lights, Big City,' and the restaurant was a regular hangout for celebrities from Andy Warhol to John Belushi. Nearly five decades and 19 restaurants later, McNally's Balthazar in SoHo, Minetta Tavern in New York and D.C., and other restaurants are still going strong. In his candid, funny and poignant memoir, 'I Regret Almost Everything,' McNally, 73, shows that he is, too. But it might not have been that way. The book opens with a 2018 suicide attempt, sparked by back pain, a crumbling marriage and the aftereffects of a 2016 stroke which left him with aphasia and a paralyzed right hand. Work — building and operating restaurants — helped keep him going. And with his speech distorted, he found a creative outlet in Instagram, where his filter-free screeds on everything — from dealing with his stroke to Balthazar's evening recap by staff — often go viral. 'In some ways, it was only after I lost my voice that I learned to speak my mind,' he writes. In his memoir, McNally charts his unlikely success story from a working-class teen actor raised in Bethnal Green, London, to being dubbed 'The Restaurateur Who Invented Downtown' in his heyday of the 1980s and '90s. His exacting eye for lighting and ambiance and charming touches in his restaurants — he sends a gratis glass of champagne to solo diners at Balthazar, and often filled the 'cheap' $15 carafe of wine at the now-defunct Schiller's with his finest bottles — have turned countless customers into regulars at his establishments.
Associated Press
05-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Associated Press
Book Review: Restauranteur Keith McNally opens up in candid memoir 'I Regret Almost Everything'
Keith McNally has been charming New York City diners since he opened his first restaurant, The Odeon, in 1980, helping transform a then-derelict TriBeCa into a hotspot for the 'glitterati.' The Odeon's glowing neon sign was featured on the cover of Jay McInerney's 1984 novel 'Bright Lights, Big City,' and the restaurant was a regular hangout for celebrities from Andy Warhol to John Belushi. Nearly five decades and 19 restaurants later, McNally's Balthazar in SoHo, Minetta Tavern in New York and D.C., and other restaurants are still going strong. In his candid, funny and poignant memoir, 'I Regret Almost Everything,' McNally, 73, shows that he is, too. But it might not have been that way. The book opens with a 2018 suicide attempt, sparked by back pain, a crumbling marriage and the aftereffects of a 2016 stroke which left him with aphasia and a paralyzed right hand. Work — building and operating restaurants — helped keep him going. And with his speech distorted, he found a creative outlet in Instagram, where his filter-free screeds on everything — from dealing with his stroke to Balthazar's evening recap by staff — often go viral. 'In some ways, it was only after I lost my voice that I learned to speak my mind,' he writes. In his memoir, McNally charts his unlikely success story from a working-class teen actor raised in Bethnal Green, London, to being dubbed 'The Restaurateur Who Invented Downtown' in his heyday of the 1980s and '90s. His exacting eye for lighting and ambiance and charming touches in his restaurants — he sends a gratis glass of champagne to solo diners at Balthazar, and often filled the 'cheap' $15 carafe of wine at the now-defunct Schiller's with his finest bottles — have turned countless customers into regulars at his establishments. McNally's memoir lets readers sidle up to the bar and feel like regulars in his life, too. ___ AP book reviews:
Vogue
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Vogue
Bar Bianchi Brings Milan Café Culture to Downtown New York City
It's hard to say whether Bar Bianchi, a new restaurant from Golden Age Hospitality—the same group behind The Nines and Le Dive—is better during the day or the night. In the afternoon, the café-style windows are thrown open as its bistro tables spill out onto the sidewalk, ready to hold gigantic Aperol spritzes in burgundy glasses. But after dark, its red and green neon sign casts a glow onto East Houston Street as negronis fly from its zinc and Formica bar, akin to a scene from Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City. 'Bar Bianchi is inspired by the piazza culture of Italy, and all these cafés and bars where you drink inside or sit outside,' Golden Age Hospitality group founder Jon Neidich tells Vogue. 'The energy between the outside and the inside kind of flows in and out.' Bar Bianchi. Photo: Liz Clayman Photo: Liz Clayman Neidich, along with his creative director Andrea Johansson and longtime collaborator Sam Buffa, was inspired by classic Milanese haunts like Bar Luce (which is owned by Prada), Bar Jamaica, and Bar Basso—'amazing places that only really exist in Europe, where you have this old world place that's stayed relevant,' he says. Indeed, hung on the walls are vintage Italian posters and the floor is composed of alternating rust, black, and white tiles; walls are painted with a faint green Venetian plaster. It feels all very '20s and '30s, until you get to the lights—space-age style scones and a 1960s hanging fixture serve as Italian modernist accents, an homage to Milan's most famous design movement. Much of the menu, overseen by chef Nicole Gajadhar, is focused on the antipasti that are the staple of aperitivo culture: think crisp fried zucchini, burrata with roasted peppers, prosciutto and melon, and fried stuffed olives. But a full dinner awaits if you wish, with dishes like a veal Milanese for two and rigatoni with a pink sauce and rigatoni with sausage, peas, and pink sauce. (Neidich named it 'Rigatoni di Nash,' as it is the favorite pasta of his young son, Nash.)
Yahoo
15-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Checking Facts in a Post-Truth World
by Austin KelleyAtlantic Monthly Press, 256 pp., $27 IN THE 1950S, TO CAPTURE WHAT IT WAS LIKE to have his stories sunk by a fact-checker, a Time magazine writer came up with a song. 'I don't think we can say this / I don't like how we play this / I'm not sure that's the way this was,' it went, with the words sung to the tune of 'You're Just in Love,' by Irving Berlin. (Berlin's daughter, Mary Ellin Barrett, was coincidentally a fact-checker for the magazine.) Ultimately, the song's 'arrogant' writer, who claims his 'facts are set in vivid hue,' gets put in his place by a dismissive researcher, who delivers the final lyric: 'They're not lies, they're just not true.' Artist Elizabeth Moran unearthed the parody tune in the Time archives while researching the magazine's fact-checking department. She also discovered that from the magazine's founding in the 1920s until the 1970s, all its fact checkers were women. Time editor Edward Kennedy cheekily warned them: 'the most important point to remember in checking is that the writer is your natural enemy. He is trying to see how much he can get away with. Remember that when people write letters about mistakes, it is you who will be screeched at. So protect yourself.' Fact-checkers have since entered popular culture as arbiters of truth. In Seinfeld, Elaine Benes dates Jack, 'a fact-checker for New York magazine.' She adds: 'It's not much, but it has a certain type of quiet dignity.' Jay McInerney worked as a fact-checker for the New Yorker for ten months before he was fired. He 'wasn't very good at it,' and 'left ingloriously with my tail between my legs'—only to go on and satirize the job in his 1985 novel Bright Lights, Big City. At one point, the novel's second-person narrator offers a warning that echoes Kennedy's: 'If an error slips into the magazine, it is one of you, and not the writer, who will be crucified.' Now, forty years after Bright Lights, we have Austin Kelley's The Fact Checker, a novel that dramatizes the life of another unnamed practitioner of the titular profession. While both books mock the minutiae of the job, Kelley's novel is less in the lineage of McInerney and more in the tradition of another facts-obsessed writer from New York: Thomas Pynchon. Get 30 day free trial 'AS A CHECKER, YOU DON'T CHOOSE what you check. You check everything. That's the calling.' Kelley's narrator-protagonist thinks of his job as a vocation. The novel's first line warns us that his career is short-lived: 'It may seem odd, if not idiotic, that the story that took up so much of my time and energy, the story that was ultimately the end for me, was about food, not terrorism.' Kelley, like McInerney, once checked facts for the New Yorker, although he doesn't seem to harbor as much of a grudge as his predecessor does against their former department. In this novel, the fact-checking department is an ascetic cadre: 'We were quiet. We were careful.' Although he had often to 'badger people about details, sometimes irrelevant details,' he 'knew from experience that some details, irrelevant in themselves, become more significant when they pile up.' Such work is only possible when one believes in capital-T Truth. The novel's fact-checker is a former history graduate student whose work on nineteenth-century utopian communities ultimately felt slight. 'Even in academia,' he admits, 'most people wanted sound bites and oversimplifications.' Yet now, 'as a fact-checker . . . my job was to prevent oversimplifications, to prevent distortions, to prevent lies.' Fact-checking has lately come to signify catching misinformation and disinformation from politicians, specifically (and from one, in particular). While the noble goal of honoring the truth remains, this mode of fact-checking, especially when it is done in real time, naturally shades into lie-catching, which will always feel haughty and ideologically motivated to some. But in the magazine world, fact-checking remains a slower, more careful art. As a writer, I've been fact-checked by Rolling Stone and the Atlantic, but also by publications well outside the legacy enterprise (including The Bulwark). It is comforting, truly, for someone to verify that I am telling the truth. Sign up to get our fully fact-checked independent political and cultural journalism delivered to your inbox. Yet the narrator of The Fact Checker knows his project is tenuous. 'I'm always drowning in a storm of information and doubt,' he laments, and his situation only gets worse after he is assigned a story on a farmer's market. The market specializes in 'trendy tomatoes,' and the whole affair seems rather tame save for an errant source: a vendor who claimed there was 'nefarious business' going on at the market. 'People sell everything here,' she said. 'It ain't all green.' The fact-checker goes to the market 'on a reconnaissance mission.' Fieldwork isn't necessarily beyond his responsibilities, but he admits that his visit was premature. 'I had not yet prepared my full list of questions. I didn't know exactly what I needed to know.' The reason soon becomes clear. The fact-checker is lonely. His ex, Magda, was often dismissive of him. He'd been single ever since their breakup: 'I was stuck in my head.' Enter Sylvia. She's quirky and chatty. She even asks if he likes fact-checking, which makes him feel special. He wants to ask Sylvia more questions, but she doesn't have a cell phone. She asks if he can stop by Friday at closing: 'We can go somewhere else to talk,' she says. And then she hands him a bag of tomatoes, suggestively: 'It seemed intimate, almost flirtatious.' Soon enough, the fact-checker is at a nightmarish supper club party with Sylvia's friends, who 'wheel a table into the middle of the room' bearing the severed head of a pig named Siddhartha; it arrives looking 'wet and oily, almost like melting wax.' Sylvia spends the night at the fact-checker's place. All seems to be going well—or, well, you know. Well enough. Share BUT WHEN MORNING COMES, THE FACT-CHECKER wakes to a coy note from Sylvia that ends with a mysterious postscript: 'Yes! Let's do it.' She's gone, and he's confused. He thinks about all their conversations and tries to parse them for leads and information about the story, but also to understand the meaning of her exclamatory note. A day becomes a week. Still nothing from Sylvia. He returns to the market, and she's gone. Nobody has any leads. Facts are his life, and since the facts aren't adding up, his life is starting to become very confusing. He needs to repurpose his professional tools for a more urgent task than he is accustomed to taking on. Here, at the halfway mark of the novel, The Fact Checker reveals its true form: This is a philosophical detective story. And its clearest and best predecessor is Thomas Pynchon's second novel, The Crying of Lot 49, published in 1966. Like Kelley's novel, Pynchon's book arrived during a tumultuous time in America, one where intense polarization had damaged the nation's fundamental sense of the truth. In The Crying of Lot 49, a woman named Oedipa Maas discovers that she has inexplicably been made 'executor, or she supposed executrix' of the estate of her ex-boyfriend, Pierce Inverarity, an eccentric real-estate mogul. She travels to Inverarity's home to meet with her co-executor and start looking into her ex's records. It is Sunday, with little else happening. She parks her car on a hill and looks down. 'The ordered swirl of houses and streets, from this high angle, sprang at her now with the same unexpected, astonishing clarity' as 'the time she'd opened a transistor radio to replace a battery and seen her first printed circuit.' Smog chokes the horizon, but sun pushes through, and Oedipa feels 'at the center of an odd, religious instant.' Oedipa wants to believe there is order in the world, that there is a reason why she has been chosen for this task—as Kelley's fact-checker clings to his belief in the simple existence of the truth, a clutched talisman of reason. Yet in scene after comic scene, Pynchon throws boffo complications into Oedipa's search. Oedipa is undaunted. 'I want to see if there's a connection,' she says. Through sheer force (or farce) of will, she seeks patterns. But she begins to doubt herself, and fears that she truly is the victim of an experiment—or worse, a conspiracy. Oedipa's steadfast belief in the power of truth—of an order behind the disorder—again connects her to the central character of The Fact Checker. Kelley's narrator knows the world is strange; he's made a career of verifying its oddities, praising its many-splendored reality and rebuking writers for the shortcomings of their offerings to it. Fact-checkers are the priests of the empirical. In Lot 49, Oedipa finally crashes headlong into the conspiracy. Old fillings in her teeth start to hurt. She stares upward at the night sky. 'There were headaches, nightmares, menstrual pains.' Although her body seems to be succumbing to paranoia, Pynchon offers just enough clues to keep her going—to keep us going—until we are forced to accept that either Oedipa has lost her mind or her increasingly elaborate fantasy is real. For all of the novel's silliness, Pynchon's stance is clear: there is a greater meaning in the madness, in the cacophony of our world, as long as we are brave and clever enough to find its patterns. Reading The Crying of Lot 49, we get the sense that Pynchon believes in some order, some God behind the curtain.1 But things have happened in the intervening decades that put Kelley's book at a far remove from Pynchon's. (Some of the steps along the historical way are evident in the subject matter of other stories the fact-checker has worked on; the titles of the parts of the book draw from a famous Bush-era locution.) When we try to steal a glimpse behind the curtain in 2025, many of us—like Kelley's narrator—see nothing there. Share The Bulwark THE FACT CHECKER FOLLOWS SOMEWHAT more pedestrian narrative paths than Pynchon's book does, although the aforementioned pig's head and an odd scene with a sheep in a bathroom get close to evoking the latter's surrealism. But the two books share an absurd sensibility, from odd characters to deliberately cringeworthy quips. (The local coffee shop in The Fact Checker, for instance, is called Grounds Zero.) Most importantly, both novels depict characters riding their obsessions into a sort of personal oblivion. In Kelley's novel, save for a little conversation and even littler intimacy, the narrator doesn't really know Sylvia. He's not quite in love with her, exactly, but rather the idea of her. Or it might be that he loves the idea of her in the context of a conspiracy he has uncovered and now must heroically expose. The climax of The Fact Checker is underwhelming, but arguably, it must be. With all its top-line absurdity, The Crying of Lot 49 would feel almost mimetic now: Imagine explaining the key players and major events of American politics in 2025 to yourself near the end of the Obama administration. 'Pynchonian' has become a ready-to-hand descriptor for contemporary chaos, but Pynchon's formative strangeness, the kind he showed in his early novels like The Crying of Lot 49, landed like a bomb in a cultural landscape defined by a fraught sense of tradition and convention, where challenges were being brought from every corner against strong positions. The culture of his time still believed in truth, however much that notion had already been damaged. His novel played with and upon something that was still there. In contrast, Kelley's novel arrives in a world wherein imagining American culture as characterized by a foundational acceptance of verifiable facts feels either anachronistic or terribly naïve. Kelley's protagonist doesn't save the day; he doesn't even understand it. This makes The Fact Checker a book that is intensely aware of its time. Perhaps we need more subtle comedies like this to help us comprehend what has happened to the truth. Share this review with a fellow member of your (future) book club. Share 1 Raised Catholic in Glen Cove, Long Island, Pynchon regularly went to Mass and confession while a student at Cornell, and in his first novel, V, a Jesuit preaches to rats in the subway.
