Ezra's Bookshelf

I Regret Almost Everything

by Keith McNally · 404 pages · ~7.5 hrs

Biography & MemoirBusiness & ManagementSociety & Culture

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The memoir of the restaurateur who did more than anyone to shape how New York eats out, written with considerably more self-doubt than the title's flippancy suggests. Keith McNally arrived in New York from a working-class East London childhood, having been a child actor in the West End and having traveled the hippie trail to Kathmandu at nineteen. He went on to create the Odeon, Cafe Luxembourg, Nell's, Balthazar, Pastis, Minetta Tavern, and Morandi, rooms so precisely calibrated that they have been imitated worldwide and are now hard to see as inventions at all. McNally writes well about the craft, explaining what he was actually doing with lighting, mirrors, banquette height, and noise, and why a restaurant that looks a century old required obsessive fabrication. But the book is more interested in his failures. He is candid about two broken marriages, about being a difficult father and a worse boss, about the class resentment he carried into rooms full of the people he was serving, and about the 2016 stroke that took his speech and left him attempting suicide. The Instagram notoriety of his later years, where he became known for public feuds and unfiltered posts, is treated as of a piece with the depression rather than separate from it. Sharp, funny, and genuinely mournful, it is a book about ambition and the bill it presents.

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