If you’ve ever been out for dinner in Manhattan, the name of the restaurateur Keith McNally will undoubtedly be familiar to you. Best known as the owner of the celebrity haunt Balthazar—a New York re-creation of a Parisian bistro that is packed to capacity night after night, and has been since it was opened in 1997—English immigrant McNally has established a reputation in his nearly five decades in the restaurant business as a two-fisted, combative but largely beloved figure. He broke through into the wider public consciousness a few years ago when he publicly banned the actor James Corden from Balthazar for being rude to his staff, then rescinded the ban after Corden apologized to him, before reinstating it after deciding that Corden hadn’t been contrite enough.
There were few books this year that I was looking forward to reading more than McNally’s memoir, I Regret Almost Everything. I had expected it would be a gloriously delicious tasting menu of his famous diners’ indiscretions, served up with a side order of McNally’s own buccaneering career through the fleshpots, bars, and speakeasies of Manhattan. Even though the entrepreneur had a near-fatal stroke in 2016 that left his right side paralyzed and his speech badly impaired, his hugely popular, endlessly witty Instagram account suggested that McNally was as talented a raconteur as he was a restaurateur. By rights, readers should have been in for a three-course feast of an autobiography.
That the book isn’t at all what was anticipated is clear from its first sentence: “In early August 2018, I tried to commit suicide.” Describing in unsparing detail the mental and physical collapse that took place after his stroke, McNally, tiring of a painful and often humiliating existence, decided to end the misery he felt by taking a massive overdose of pills. Discovered by one of his sons, he was committed firstly to hospital, and then to a psychiatric institution for therapy. While there, he began to explore the idea of committing his thoughts to his typewriter, which he did slowly and laboriously, using his good hand to do so. I Regret Almost Everything is the result, and even the most sympathetic of readers will regret that this is a book so clearly influenced by trauma, rather than triumph.
The first third of the book contains its two most jaw-dropping revelations: firstly, the suicide attempt, and secondly, McNally’s account of a love affair that this otherwise heterosexual man embarked upon with the playwright Alan Bennett, when Bennett was aged 35 and McNally was 18. The two had met when McNally, who briefly worked as a boy actor, had appeared in Bennett’s 1968 satirical play Forty Years On. The relationship, which began as that of mentor and student, eventually developed into something else, although McNally is quick to note, “While I loved Alan, the attraction was never physical, and our nights together were more intimate than passionate.”
That sound you hear—somewhere between a cough and a snort—is that of a thousand aspirant Bennett biographers receiving the first thing that amounts to a proper scoop that has occurred for decades during the playwright’s lifetime. But if you’re expecting to read a damning account of the private life of a much-loved British icon, you’ll be disappointed. McNally has remained friends with Bennett (who was an investor in his first restaurant Odeon, presumably cashing in quite significantly) ever since, and deals with the anticipated issues of exploitation and the like robustly. (It will come as little surprise that McNally is no supporter of the #MeToo movement, seeing it as an assault on free speech, and is a stout defender of Woody Allen.)
Thereafter, you’re agog for more high-end celebrity gossip, but you will be waiting for a long time if so. There is an account of Bill Cosby visiting McNally’s nightclub Nell’s, insisting on no special treatment, and then writing McNally “an incredibly nasty letter … complaining about the rude service he’d been subjected to.” McNally therefore writes, “I’d never found Cosby funny before, but after this I found him absolutely repugnant.” Fair enough. There is a heavily redacted, inconsequential account of his short-lived affair with a well-known television star in the ’90s, and Corden-gate is briefly discussed toward the close (mainly in the context of how pleased McNally was that it raised his Instagram following). But, once again, if you’re after filth and scandal, you will be disappointed. There is one central target in this book, and it is Keith McNally himself, who does not emerge well in the slightest.
McNally is open about his lack of conventional education, and he has been fortunate enough to have befriended many of the cleverest intellectuals in Anglophone society. After all, even the smartest of people want to be fed, and fed well. Following his association with Bennett—who presumably has given his blessing to the exposure of their relationship in this book—he formed another bond with Bennett’s Beyond the Fringe castmate Jonathan Miller, and later went on to have similarly close associations with Tom Stoppard and David Hare, “a writer whose plays are often accused of lacking heart.” Yet he has no illuminating anecdotes from his acquaintance with these people, just as, when he met Picasso’s muse Françoise Gilot, “I was so captivated by Gilot’s expressive, birdlike face that I didn’t take her stories in and, as a consequence, have no memory of them.”
McNally has the passion of the autodidact, and I Regret Almost Everything is rich in literary allusion, from Auden and Orwell to Kierkegaard and Somerset Maugham. Yet the quotations that ostentatiously trumpet his learning seldom lead to greater illumination, and the author often opens himself up to charges either of poor editing or misjudgment. It is unfortunate that, on one page, he boldly declares that both he and his brother abhor cliché, and that on the next, he describes someone as being “bald as a coot.”
As a writer, McNally is serviceable without being inspired, and I often wondered what a Jay McInerney (whose first novel Bright Lights Big City famously used an image of the Odeon on its cover) or Christopher Hitchens would have done with his admittedly extraordinary life story. This is a book that should be energetic and vibrant, a colorful and amphetamine-level rush, like the famous tracking shot in Goodfellas committed to paper. Instead, it’s more like being served the set menu in a half-empty establishment where the waiter dolefully tells you his unhappy life story along with the specials. It isn’t that it’s without its charms—the descriptions of McNally’s construction of his restaurant empire, and their day-to-day operations, have a focus and detail that makes them truly fascinating to read—but it’s a curiously unhappy and constrained book that belies its creator’s vigor and obvious intelligence.
Had I wished to bum a free meal from McNally, I would simply have praised I Regret Almost Everything, but I suspect that this most outspoken of figures detests an ass-kisser. Besides, it’s not worth lying for the sake of a complimentary steak frites at Balthazar. You finish the book not thrilled by a grand life well-lived, but feeling sorry for its author. Somehow, I don’t think that was what the publisher was expecting when they commissioned it. McNally has already suggested on Instagram that he is unhappy with this version of the memoir, and has even asked purchasers not to buy it until the inevitable reprint. It would be rude not to obey his wishes and hold off, in the hope that a better, more interesting account of a remarkable existence awaits.
I Regret Almost Everything: A Memoir
by Keith McNally
Gallery Books, 310 pp., $29.99
Alexander Larman is a journalist, historian, and author, most recently, of Power and Glory: Elizabeth II and the Rebirth of Royalty (St. Martin’s Press).
