Keith McNally was hunting for vintage lace curtains in a Parisian market when an old, sepia-coloured photograph caught his eye. It depicted a turn-of-the-century bar, showing a battered zinc counter with liquor bottles stacked metres high on the wall. Flanking the bottles were two statues of half-naked women, carved in the classic Greek style.
McNally forgot about the curtains and bought the photograph instead. For the next five years he carried it in his back pocket, thinking that if he ever found a space with a sky-high ceiling, he would build that bar. And one day he did just that, and the famous Balthazar was born in SoHo, in downtown New York.
Almost 30 years on, the restaurant is still beloved by picky NYC customers, a French brasserie with red-leather banquettes and vast antique mirrors, rubbed flaxen paint on the walls, and clever honey-coloured lighting that makes everyone look gorgeous. With its steak frites and onion soup it could be in Lyon, but he skilfully pulls it back from pastiche.McNally has gone on to open a dozen more restaurants and has been called the Alex Ferguson of New York’s restaurant scene, winning consistently in a vicious, ever-changing league. On the one hand, he’s a pugnacious Brit and, on the other, a man with celestial taste in interior design, who insists on authenticity in his materials. “There’s no limit to the money I won’t spend — even money I don’t have — to make something perfect. And by perfect, I mean imperfect and undesigned-looking,” he says.
And so, in his restaurants and houses wooden fittings are hand-carved and paint is layered and scratched, furniture comes from flea markets in America and Europe, and he combs demolition sites for wide wooden floorboards and original station tiles.
He’s known for not suffering fools and throws out punters who are rude to the waitstaff. One of his most notorious tiffs was with the comedian James Corden, who had reduced his waitress to tears. McNally called Corden a “tiny cretin of a man” on Instagram and the most abusive customer since Balthazar had opened its doors. The resulting skirmish kept columnists busy for months and only enhanced McNally’s reputation in a city that loves a good brawl.
And then, in 2016, he was felled by a massive stroke. Two years later, he tried to commit suicide. This is where his addictive new memoir begins.
I Regret Almost Everything is a brutally honest look back over his life that records his successes but also his failings. He references George Orwell, who wrote, “Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful.”
The future restaurateur (he hates the term: “Does a plumber call himself a plombier?”) came from a working-class family in the less-than-salubrious area of London called Bethnal Green. His father was a stevedore who laboured in the shipyard, while his mother cleaned offices and dreamed of getting her family of three boys out of a council house and up the social ladder. McNally was pretty and could charm birds out of trees, but he was lazy at school. He found his tribe in the theatre and was 17 when he was cast by Alan Bennett in his play Forty Years On, about boys in an upper-class boarding school. He went on to first have an affair and then a lifelong friendship with Bennett, who introduced him to a world of culture and intellect. McNally is still a hungry reader and buyer of art, and there is no doubt that theatrical experience underpins his ineffable talent for making beautiful restaurants and homes.
He was drawn to Los Angeles to work in the film industry, stopped off in New York to earn some money waiting tables, and discovered he liked the work and loved the city. He was promoted and promoted until he and his first wife opened their own restaurant, The Odeon, and he took off from there.
In 2016 he was in London and had taken two of his children to an art exhibition when a “horrific tingling shot up my left arm and, like some malignant jellyfish, clasped itself onto my face”.
The stroke left him paralysed down his right side and his speech damaged. Depressed and exhausted by months and months of seemingly useless treatment, he decided to take his life. He saved all his sleeping pills and painkillers and went with the family to their farm on Martha’s Vineyard. He washed down the fistful of pills and drifted off. Fortunately his son saw him through the window, passed out on the floor, and raised the alarm. A year later his second wife divorced him. He was flattened once again.
It has been a long and bitter climb back to some kind of equanimity. When he had the stroke, he was beginning work on another restaurant, Pastis, and his business partner refused to release him from his contract. It was the best thing to happen, as it forced McNally back into the world. He maintains that when all seems lost, work of any kind provides what we need most — a sense of purpose.
In the end this is a portrait of a brilliantly creative person, humbled and riddled with self-doubt, who has changed the face of one of the world’s great cities.
From the July edition of Wanted, 2025
