From Reflected by Vijay Balakrishnan, a portfolio in issue no. 185 of the Review.
“Restaurants will break your heart” is something that I often hear myself saying. It has become a mantra. When did I start saying it, I wonder. Maybe it was when I first discovered the criss-crossed lines of affection; falling in a crash-out kind of love with a fellow line cook because he helped me with my mise en place. Maybe it was when my sous-chef first called me mediocre; we all watched slices of chocolate cake I cut pile up in the garbage because of my disappointing quenelles. Maybe it was the first time that I had to fire a kitchen assistant over the phone, hearing him quietly murmur in response, “Okay.” Maybe (definitely) it was the time I got fired—the bad news sandwiched between my manager saying I was “amazing” and also “so great.” Maybe it was the first time I watched a plate of food I made go out and I understood, profoundly, that I would never know who might eat it.
In his new memoir, I Regret Almost Everything, Keith McNally’s tells us that his heart has been broken many times over—but it seems that restaurants are, in fact, what have saved him. As a diner, his restaurants have certainly given me much life force and heart-mend; they are perhaps the most accessibly glamorous in New York City, where I grew up. Over the course of his career, McNally, who is now seventy-three, has opened Augustine, Balthazar, Café Luxembourg, Cherche Midi, Lucky Strike, Nell’s, Minetta Tavern, Morandi, Pastis, Pravda, and Schiller’s, as well as Balthazar in London and the new Minetta Tavern, in Washington, D.C.
This memoir spans the course of McNally’s life. It loops and shifts between timelines, but in a way that is forgivable and even charming: it reads like McNally remembers as he writes and then—urgently—wants not to forget. A funny tension for someone who claims to regret almost everything. He weaves together memories from the working-class London of his childhood to his young man’s adventures abroad and the sets (strip clubs and playhouses alike) where he realized that film and theater were what moved him most. But more often than not, we’re in New York City in the eighties, witnessing, up close, the building of his empire, the explosions of his love affairs, and time’s passage and pains to the present. McNally turns on the overheads: We get intimate, poignant, sometimes brutal moments from his marriages (two, both now finished) and earnest, messy fatherhood. Lights intensify on a stroke, a suicide attempt, a stint at McLean, and an arrival at new kind of life.
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Much contemporary interest in restaurant culture gravitates toward narratives that are bustling, kinetic, chaotic. Think The Bear or the work of Anthony Bourdain—cigarettes and tattoos and arm burns; a masculine speed machine to which my psychoanalyst has implied I am quite possibly addicted. But in real life, there’s more to it. Quiet pauses, the catching of breath, the exhale of the new morning: the beats when the wave of service has crashed. McNally feels this too: “In my fifty years working and owning restaurants, my happiest times were at the Odeon, sitting down with the waiters and waitresses at three in the morning, listening to them joke about the night as they smoked, drank beer and counted their tips. Nothing since has ever matched that feeling.” Ideally something matches that feeling, but I know what he means.
By staging meals in the same spaces every day, we disorient time. In restaurants, especially those with liquor licenses, there’s a sense in which, for the diner, it is always nighttime. A weird time glitch for service workers, too. “I feel like I was just here,” you often say to your coworker. But it has been hours, or days, or perhaps years. I used to run the kitchen at a bar. The kitchen was in the basement, but service happened upstairs. I would come in at 2 P.M., with the front of house. Light poking through the blinds, which would be raised as night unfolded, we would say that the bar was a set and we were in a one-act play. Our lives played out around the horseshoe bar, the spotlight moving from one of us to the other.
There’s a comfort to this strange repetition, maybe even a power in its performance—especially on nights when service can feel futile and meaningless. There’s a soothing quality to the rhythm, until there’s not. One day, someone doesn’t show up for work. The play goes on, but the cast changes. We get older. Everyone moves on and out, to the next act; a sense of ending hovers. This is something McNally knows and emphasizes in the meandering memories of his life. As someone whose first real love was the theater, he is well aware of the timing and pacing of each era, the necessity of an act’s end. “I’ve screwed up so many times that I am constantly starting over,” he says, “And always for the last time.”
A search for authenticity seems to be McNally’s most powerful motivator. In other words: “It’s okay to not play the fucking game.” He locates it—the real—briefly, which is more than many can say. Real love; real, tangible success; and abundant beauty in the places where he lives. He also locates a realness—or it locates him—in the limitations of the body and the brain. A stroke in November 2016 left him half paralyzed and without the capacity for language he’d formerly possessed. To McNally, in the mental hospital, a doctor quotes the psychologist William James, who emphasized that our bodies’ limits activate powerful emotional consequences. The consequence for McNally is the one that shows up for all of us: we don’t have that much time.
McNally is left with profound aphasia—a beautiful word for a tremendous loss. Without his old capacity for language and movement, he meets an existential futility and depression that make some logical sense. The stroke robs him of much embodiment, seemingly leading him (through the darkest places) to rely on perception and memory, tuning into a new frequency to process his own life. This profound new limitation, I think, is what makes the writing feel so urgent. On rest at McLean, he is asked to write about opening a restaurant. Instead, he finds the story of his suicide attempt flooding the page. Abandoning the original piece, he embarks on the telling of his gristly reality. This new subject arrives feverishly, the original prompt rendered arbitrary. Ever recalcitrant (his eccentric Instagram, in many ways, is an homage to rebellion), he follows this new urge: each morning he rises and writes. “I couldn’t wait to start.” he says. “Suddenly, I had purpose.”
This book has a real sense of mourning—normal for a restaurant person, normal for anyone. Mourning for the errors, the things that could have been expressed, for the former body and brain, for youth, for botched films and unsuccessful plays. Seeming failures and shortcomings, all transmuted into what are called regrets, but regrets that seem quite crucial to a life. Much of the book describes McNally’s arduous journey to reopen Pastis in 2019 while recovering from his debilitations of mind and body. He succeeds, and the restaurant gets two stars from The Times. He has triumphed once again but maintains a refrain that defines the book: “Once I had achieved what I was after, I no longer desired it.” Depressing? Sure. But there’s a Zen-like quality to his honesty. Restaurants will break your heart. Or, perhaps more inevitably, restaurants or not, your heart will break.
I read the book quickly and was often moved. More than anything it all made me want to get a martini—with McNally, or at least in the soft glow of one of his restaurants, where time passes, but the light stays the same.
Rosa Shipley is a cook and writer living in Brooklyn. She writes the Substack Palate Cleanse.