Latest news with #IRegretAlmostEverything
Eater
3 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.
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
Atlantic
06-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
A Portrait of the Restaurateur as an Artist
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.
Times
06-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Me and Alan Bennett … and Anna Wintour and James Corden too
Walking past the New York restaurant Balthazar on a gorgeous spring day is like passing a Manet in a gallery. The place is a work of art in itself and it displays a certain social class in their element. People spill out of the doorway onto the street and lounge on the benches outside waiting for a table. Keith McNally's restaurants, and this is one of them, are places people say you must go to, if you go to New York. In fact, if you are having dinner in New York and you are not having it at a McNally restaurant, are you really having dinner? McNally himself lives, if not over the shop, then a few blocks away, on the seventh floor of a SoHo apartment building. He answers the door with a nod and leads me inside, leaning on a cane and asking, haltingly, if I would like a coffee. The idea I had of McNally was that he was rather like his restaurants: constantly busy and full of the brash spirit of downtown New York. He's like that on Instagram, discussing the issues of the day. Lauren Sánchez returns to Earth after her ten-minute mission into space aboard her fiancé Jeff Bezos's rocket, declaring that 'Something in me is still up there.' 'HOPEFULLY, YOUR FAKE BREASTS,' McNally proclaims. (Sánchez has never said she's had breast surgery.) He gives nightly reports of the goings-on in his kingdom of restaurants, occasionally excommunicating diners for the crime of being rude to one of his waiters. James Corden was subjected to one of these summary judgments in 2022 and barred for life until, after grovelling apologies, McNally relented. Two nights before we meet, a diner is alleged to have asked a waitress: 'Do you like to have sex with rich white guys?' 'Brian **** will NOT be returning to Minetta or any of my restaurants, Ever Again,' McNally declares. 'That crude f***er is banned for ever.' McNally is a power in the land, 'the man who invented downtown', as one newspaper put it, a chap unafraid to dish it out to a billionaire's wife or a late-night host or this dreadful Brian fellow, whoever he is. But McNally, 73, is also living with the after-effects of a debilitating stroke that he suffered in 2016, when he was living in London. Waking in Charing Cross Hospital, he found that he could write the letters of the alphabet but not say them. 'The words wouldn't conform to my efforts,' he writes in a new memoir: I Regret Almost Everything. 'I sounded like a stage drunk.' After two days his voice returned, but it was 'a specter of its former self', he writes. 'A voice that had once been clear and concise was now leaden and sluggish. At best, I sounded like someone speaking underwater. I still do.' Two years later, on holiday with his family on Martha's Vineyard, he tried to take his life. He tried to arrange it so that a close friend would find his body, but McNally's teenage son George happened to rise early the next morning and found McNally's door locked. 'If George hadn't woken uncharacteristically early that morning I probably would have died,' he writes. As he was recovering in a psychiatric hospital, his longtime friend Alan Bennett suggested that he 'write things down'. He also got an email from an editor who knew nothing of his suicide attempt, but wanted him to write about how on earth he managed to run three lively New York restaurants while still struggling to speak. 'I began writing and the words came flat out,' he says. 'I wrote so much, I realised I can't stop myself. So I said, I have to pass on the article, because I want to include so much more. It was a relief, really, a relief for me to write. So that's where I began.' He has, it turns out, one hell of a story. I did not know, for instance, that he was once a stage actor, that he had a relationship with Bennett, that he was actually a frustrated film director who strayed, almost by accident, into the restaurant business. He grew up in bomb-pocked Bethnal Green, east London, the son of a docker, with a younger sister and two tough older brothers, Peter and Brian. Brian was a footballer and 'an aggressive street fighter', McNally writes. For a while in his youth, 'I was scared to death of running into either of my brothers outside the house.' Leaving school at 16 with a single O-level, he became a bellboy at the Hilton on Park Lane in London. An American film producer who came to stay there asked him to read for a part and cast him as a street urchin alongside Michael Redgrave in Mr Dickens of London. This led him into acting. Do you ever think you've led a charmed life, I ask. 'Um,' McNally replies. 'It doesn't look like that now.' He thinks his parents and brothers were actually embarrassed when he started getting roles, including in a well-reviewed play that ran for ten weeks in York. 'People from my background associated the theater with homosexuality,' he writes. 'In this case, they would have been right, because during my time in York I had an affair with a male cast member.' He has had two gay relationships in his life, he writes. The second, the more serious, was with Bennett. He met the playwright while appearing in Bennett's Forty Years On, in the West End, alongside Bennett and John Gielgud. After its run ended, he and Bennett began taking weekly trips to the theatre. 'Sleeping with Alan felt like a natural progression of our friendship,' McNally writes. 'It was uncomplicated.' The story of their time together reads rather like a Bennett play. Apparently, Bennett based a couple of characters on McNally. I ask what this was like. 'Rightly or wrongly, you never believe you're the person others see you as,' he says, via email (we have agreed to do this interview partly by email) 'so — besides being vaguely embarrassing — it really didn't bother me.' Bennett 'never tried to educate me, but in the process he did educate me', he says. McNally wanted to be a film director, but in Britain he felt constrained by his background, in a way that he never did abroad. He decided to make for New York, where he began working at an ice-cream parlour, and as an oyster shucker at a smart restaurant called One Fifth, where he was soon made a waiter. 'Customers could be surprisingly forgiving once they heard my English accent,' he writes. After six weeks, he was the maître d'. 'I then realized that charm played a more important role than competence in America,' he writes. He met his first wife, Lynn, at One Fifth. Also a pretty young Englishwoman named Anna Wintour. He and Wintour would go to the cinema together in the afternoon — 'the most intimate thing two people can do at that time of day.' They're still friends, McNally says. They text each other, usually about tennis. With Lynn and his brother Brian, who followed him to New York, McNally opened a restaurant called Odeon in 1980. Their parents put in some money, as did Bennett, who came out to help with the renovations, driving with McNally to New Jersey to pick up three large, pink antique mirrors, returning to Manhattan very slowly, for fear of breaking them. Would the motorists stuck behind them have honked 'if they'd known that the tentative driver ahead was one of England's most distinguished playwrights', he wonders. 'In hindsight, I think they would have honked twice as loud.' We're talking about this when a man sidles out of a room in McNally's flat. It's Brian, his older brother. He's a little more compact, with more of a London accent. They have had the occasional falling-out, but now Brian, who lives in Connecticut, will stay with him whenever he's in New York. 'Whenever food goes missing in the fridge I know that my brother's in the apartment,' McNally says later. You come over very well in the book, I tell Brian. McNally splutters. 'You read the early version,' he says to me. 'Yeah,' Brian laughs, throatily. 'That was the other draft.' Brian is also in a new memoir by his friend Graydon Carter, the former editor of Vanity Fair, McNally says. 'I only know that there's the fight,' Brian replies. 'With Richard Gere.' Where did you fight Richard Gere, I ask. Brian erupts again, and fortunately again, he is laughing. 'Karl Lagerfeld's house.' Carter describes being at a dinner party and seeing Gere and Brian 'standing face to face and it looked like one of them might hit the other'. Brian says Gere had arrived at this party during Paris Fashion Week, 'all scruffy and holes in his jeans, I mean, total poser'. They were seated at neighbouring tables. Gere's ex-girlfriend had invested in one of Brian's restaurants that he was forced to close. Apparently, she had borrowed the money from Gere. Brian says they repaid her the investment, but there had obviously been a misunderstanding. 'So it wasn't really his fault,' he says. 'I mean, it was his fault in a way because he jumped to conclusions.' Some things were said. 'Then I got up, because enough was enough, you know. So then I had a bit of a go at him. But he's such a coward because he completely sort of backed down, after acting tough.' Brian asks if his brother wants to go to the party being thrown for Carter's book that very evening by Michael Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor. Everyone who is anyone will be there. 'Come on!' Brian says. 'No,' McNally says. 'Partly, I'm embarrassed [about] the way I look … I'd rather hear from you about the night.' 'All right,' Brian says. 'I'll come straight back.' A little later there's a knock at the door. It is Ian McPheely, who has worked with McNally for decades on the design of his restaurants. Talking about this process, McNally can sound rather like an abstract artist. He needs a detail that gives him a starting point. For Café Luxembourg it was some cream and blue wall tiles he spotted in a scene from the Australian film Starstruck. For Balthazar, it was a sepia photograph he bought in a Paris flea market of a bar with a high ceiling, the shelves of bottles behind it bracketed by towering Greek sculptures. They're working together now for another restaurateur, designing an Italian restaurant in Philadelphia. I'd quite like to hang around and watch, and see the artists at work. But it's time for me to go. McNally tells me later, over email, that he was 'always fairly introverted but since my stroke, I've become even more so'. The funny thing is, he almost has a higher profile now, thanks to his presence on Instagram. I've heard diners complain about the possibility that they might be harangued on social media by the owner of the restaurant they are patronising. 'I think there's a good argument to say I'm wrong to do this,' McNally says. 'I think about it seriously, um, because it could be dangerous.' In his memoir, he acknowledges becoming rather intoxicated 'with self-righteousness' during his stand-off with Corden. On the other hand, his staff rather like it when their boss brings the hammer down on a rude customer. 'Before Instagram … the customer had a hundred per cent of the rights,' he says. 'Now it makes a balance at least.' I ask if it's been good for business. 'I'm not on Instagram to drum up business for my restaurants,' he says. After one post, 'Jerry Seinfeld's wife Jessica, who has a huge following of bored housewives, urged them all to boycott my restaurants,' he says. 'Business was significantly down for the next ten days. Overall though, I think my restaurants lose as much as they gain by my presence on Instagram. I really don't care. Since my voice was so badly impaired by a stroke, Instagram — for better or worse — has become my voice.' There's a line in his book about how 'before my stroke, I did everything to keep genuine emotion away'. You say you are now more in touch with your emotions, I say. 'I've never in my life said, 'I'm more in touch with my emotions'!' he replies. 'I'd rather be tortured by Hamas than say that. I may have said that the only thing that suffering teaches you is to recognise suffering in others. Which I think is true.' For a year after his stroke, 'I didn't go into any of my places,' he says. 'I was too embarrassed and slightly humiliated.' But now 'I think in some ways me being disabled makes the staff closer, feel closer to me,' he says. 'To have somebody in charge who is vulnerable, you know?' he says, sounding like a man who is very in touch with his emotions. Even if he would definitely not say so himself.I Regret Almost Everything by Keith McNally (Simon & Schuster £25). To order a copy go to Free UK standard P&P on online orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
