Latest news with #KeithMcNally
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
Wall Street Journal
23-05-2025
- Wall Street Journal
‘I Regret Almost Everything' Review: Keith McNally Serves Up Memories
In 2016 Keith McNally had a beautiful wife, five children, a home in London and a thriving empire of eight fashionable restaurants in New York City. One morning in November that year, his world was overturned: He was gripped by a horrific metallic tingling 'like some malignant jellyfish' that clasped itself onto his face. Hours later he woke up in a London hospital. Mr. McNally had suffered a stroke that left his speech slurred and his right side paralyzed. 'Overnight I was confined to a wheelchair and deprived of language.' The loss of words and physical control left him feeling 'buried alive.' His speech returned in days, but the episode catapulted him into an emotional and marital crisis. Within two years, he would attempt suicide with an overdose of pills. Mr. McNally's autobiography, 'I Regret Almost Everything,' is wry, insightful and vulnerable, a courageous book alive with mordant humor and British irony. At the beginning of the book Mr. McNally quotes 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.' Mr. McNally doesn't spare himself: failed marriages, business misfires, his mercurial relationship with his brother Brian (with whom he had a fight that ended with a broken cheekbone) are all confronted with appealing honesty. The elegantly frayed patrician style of Mr. McNally's restaurants owes nothing to his background. He was born in 1951 in Bethnal Green, a London neighborhood that was solidly working class in those days. The McNally family lived in a one-story prefab, and he played with his friends in dirt-filled craters left by Luftwaffe bombs. His father was a waterfront laborer and an amateur boxer, his mother an office cleaner who read obsessively and considered herself socially above her husband. Their 'grim and joyless' marriage lasted years and produced four children. Mr. McNally's opportunity for escape came after he left school at 16. He took a job as a bellhop at the Hilton Park Lane hotel, where he was spotted by a guest who offered him a role as a street urchin in a film. Mr. McNally became a fledgling actor, appearing in the satirist Alan Bennett's 1968 play 'Forty Years On' in the West End. After the play's run ended, he began an affair with Mr. Bennett, who was 17 years his senior. McNally had just turned 18. The liaison lasted until Mr. McNally came to America in 1975 with vague plans for making films of his own.
Vogue
08-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Vogue
The Unhinged Joys of the Boomer Instagram
While I have yet to successfully wean myself off of social media, try as I may, I've become quite good at figuring out what kind of Instagram behavior most makes me want to delete my account. Maybe I'm a traitor to my generation, but I just can't stand how curated yet faux-spontaneous half the posts clogging my feed tend to be, with their perfectly posed photos captioned by purposely self-negging little captions like 'recent dump' or 'life's ok.' Am I a hater? Yes, absolutely. But I don't hate it all: Over the last few years, I've become enraptured by what I like to call 'boomer Instagram,' in which people over the age of 60 take to the platform and make it their own in a way that we millennials can only dream of. Obviously, the father of boomer Instagram is none other than restaurateur Keith McNally. While I can't wait to dive into McNally's new memoir, I'm catching up with old posts on his completely epic Instagram, on which he slams a recent Telegraph profile of him as 'poorly written and woefully inaccurate' (get 'em, Keith!), delves into what can only be described as soft erotica about sexual opportunities gone by, and, of course, weighs in on the issues of the day in his own inimitable style. I've never had the opportunity to spend IRL time with McNally, but I can't imagine the experience is all that different from reading his Instagram; each post feels like he's coming up next to you to whisper something snide and right on the money in the middle of weekend brunch service at Balthazar, and I absolutely can't get enough. Of course, McNally isn't the only social media poet who's endeared me to boomer Instagram. No less a film authority than Francis Ford Coppola himself is quite online too, charmingly describing himself in his bio as 'Film Director, Writer, Producer, Great-Grandfather' and posting extremely dadcore (or, indeed, great-grandpa-core?) shots of himself vacationing at waterfalls in fun, printed shirts; impromptu odes to Noël Coward; and fangirl-ish tributes to granddaughter Gia Coppola after the release of her film The Last Showgirl. Not to be outdone, Kyle MacLachlan is also out there with his little 'hi! i'm kyle' bio, adorably dancing to Haim songs and posting thirsty odes to Lactaid. (He's so babygirl for that!)
Times
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Don't call me a restaurateur! Confessions of the cockney who conquered New York
S ome people seem to live many lives in the time that most of us manage just one. Keith McNally, 73, is such a person. Born poor in Bethnal Green, east London, before the age of 20 he was an actor, romantically involved with Alan Bennett, who he says 'enriched my life in ways I find hard to explain'. In many memoirs — many lives — a relationship with one of the most notable playwrights of the 20th century would be the most interesting thing to happen. In I Regret Almost Everything it is merely a warm-up. McNally — the New York restaurateur 'who invented downtown', as journalists seem obliged to describe him — was born in 1951, and has been at the centre of the
