McNally seemed to enjoy occupying a place in New York’s cultural landscape; he describes McInerney asking for permission to use the restaurant’s image and giving him a manuscript to read. “My instinct told me the book was going to be a turkey,” McNally writes. “Feeling sorry for the unknown McInerney, I let him use the image for free.” McNally has told this story over the years with varying degrees of diplomacy. “He made some terrible jokes that were very unfunny,” he explained, in 2005. “I just thought he was talentless.” In the memoir, McNally concludes on a self-deprecating note (“So much for my instinct”), but, even so, he reveals a fondness for tweaking his clientele. “When customers ask me where the bathroom is, I often say we don’t have one,” he writes, of his “minor subversiveness.”

Keeping people lightly off balance kept them coming back for more. Nell’s, the night club he and Wagenknecht opened with a friend, the Australian actress Nell Campbell, in 1986, demonstrated this principle. The door policy was ostensibly democratic—a five-dollar cover for all, regardless of fame—but, given that the capacity inside was two hundred and fifty, it was also subject to the imperious choices of Campbell and her deputies. Cher was famously turned away. For those who gained entry, the experience presented an alternative to the discos and vast dance clubs that had until recently dominated New York night life. There was a full dinner menu and live music in an intimate atmosphere of overstuffed Victoriana. (Patrick Bateman was a fictional habitué.) A Vanity Fair story described it as looking “like an old-fashioned gents’ club. Or a dilapidated English country house.” The boy from Bethnal Green had invented an ancestral estate on West Fourteenth Street.

“To want to own a restaurant can be a strange and terrible affliction,” Bourdain writes in “Kitchen Confidential.” The economics are daunting, the odds of success bad. “What causes such a destructive urge in so many otherwise sensible people?” Bourdain asks. A desire for sex, he hypothesizes, and for life-of-the-party panache; would-be owners want “to swan about the dining room signing dinner checks like Rick in ‘Casablanca.’ ” In Bourdain’s assessment, restaurant ownership holds the illusory promise of easy pleasure—but it’s also the perfect venue to work through whatever baggage you’ve got about your family. After all, a restaurant is a place where you provide the sustenance, you decide who belongs, you make the rules.

Take Danny Meyer—a prolific restaurateur who, like McNally, emerged in nineteen-eighties Manhattan. Meyer builds sleek marvels of efficiency for power lunchers, and, in his book “Setting the Table,” he lays out a Boy Scout-ish ideal of hospitality. His vision of codified institutional niceness seems tailored to impress his forebears, prosperous Midwestern businessmen who had doubted his choice of career. Gabrielle Hamilton’s 2011 memoir, “Blood, Bones & Butter,” tells how she came to open the beloved East Village restaurant Prune. After a chaotic childhood in the Pennsylvania countryside, Hamilton found that running her own place was a way of cultivating comfort and control. (Her formative food memory is the lamb her bohemian parents would spit-roast for parties, before their divorce ended the family’s rural idyll.)

“As a child, I never ate in a proper restaurant,” McNally writes. “For people like my parents, entering a white-tablecloth restaurant was like being pushed on stage without knowing their lines.” He explains that he left England in part to escape his constant awareness of its class hierarchies. In New York, he found himself working in a field that was still rigidly hierarchical, but where status was up for grabs. His restaurants were places where his own taste reigned supreme. He could adopt the élite trappings that appealed to him, and choose who made up the in-house aristocracy.

Francophilia, a time-honored ticket to worldliness, became McNally’s governing principle, whether at Café Luxembourg (which he and Wagenknecht opened on the Upper West Side, in 1983), Lucky Strike (SoHo, 1989), or Pastis (the meatpacking district, 1999). He made forays into a fantasy version of Soviet Russia (with Pravda) and Italy (Morandi), but the French classics remained his template. When his effort at a pizza place on the Bowery, Pulino’s, shut down, in 2014, he reinvented the space as a spot for foie gras and frogs’ legs called Cherche Midi.

People wanted to feel like they were in France, McNally recognized, but also to feel right at home. They wanted, for example, to be able to order a hamburger—an item he insisted Balthazar’s menu include, despite the chefs’ reluctance. His restaurants conjured a cinematic Paris with their zinc bars, leather banquettes, old tiles, and, of course, those yellowing walls. By the time his flagship opened, in SoHo, McNally had arrived at his own method for achieving the effect he’d first seen in Bennett’s sitting room. “I glaze the walls—I don’t use paint—with a mixture of pigment and decorator’s glaze, several layers of it,” he explained, in 1998. “Then a coat of varnish that gives it the slightly nicotined appearance.” He’d perfected an atmosphere of smoky dissolution just as actual smoking disappeared from New York’s dining rooms.

Celebrities populated McNally’s realm—Jerry Seinfeld proposed to his wife at Balthazar; “Sex and the City” and Woody Allen both filmed at Pastis—and civilians were drawn to the frisson of exclusivity. Once past the door (or the secret reservation phone line), anyone could be beautiful. Lighting, as a rule, was soft, warm—hospitable. “If you didn’t look good at Café Luxembourg, then you probably should have gone home immediately and not come out for two days,” Hal Rubenstein, a former waiter there who became a founding editor of InStyle, once said. “People used to call up to find out what kind of bulbs we used.”

In 2008, Richard Price published “Lush Life,” a literary crime novel centered on a Lower East Side restaurant with a resemblance to Schiller’s Liquor Bar, whose blurry photograph appeared on the cover of the book. Price describes the establishment he calls Berkmann’s as a “restaurant dressed as theater dressed as nostalgia”; its owner, modelled loosely on McNally, is named Harry Steele. An impresario with “dour, baggy eyes” like Serge Gainsbourg’s, Steele is a sharklike figure whose taste for picturesque decay has a somewhat ominous cast: he embodies the money and power poised to transform the neighborhood inexorably. “Inventing downtown” is perhaps the same thing as gentrifying it.

“Lush Life” ends with Steele building a Berkmann’s replica in an Atlantic City casino. In his memoir, McNally discusses turning down a proposal in 2000 to reproduce Balthazar in Las Vegas—but in recent years he’s proved more receptive to such opportunities (even if the developer who paid him to build Balthazar London, whom he calls “the integrity-free Richard Caring,” is the subject of an extended diatribe). A Pastis opened in Miami in 2023, followed the next year by one in Washington, D.C., which is now also home to a duplicate of Minetta Tavern, McNally’s Greenwich Village “Parisian steakhouse.”

Wagenknecht and McNally divorced in 1994, after having three children.(She bought out his shares of the Odeon, Café Luxembourg, and Nell’s.) By the early two-thousands, he’d remarried and had two more children. “I needed to open more restaurants and put some bread on the table,” he writes, of this period. Business remained steady, even if his restaurants had ceded their cultural dominance to usurpers in the far-flung territory of Brooklyn.

In late 2016, McNally had a stroke that paralyzed the right side of his body and impaired his ability to speak. His second marriage ended, and four months after that he attempted suicide. This tumultuous part of his life frames the memoir: he looks back over his triumphs as he despairs of replicating (or even enjoying) them. The rigors and disappointments of physical rehabilitation swing abruptly into real-estate deals and restaurant gossip. Convalescence makes sense as a time of personal reflection—McNally explains in the book that he began writing while teaching himself to type with just his left hand. But a more useful context in which to understand his story might be the period that followed. In February, 2020, McNally joined Instagram—and so, just as restaurants shut down, he discovered a new sort of scene to cultivate.

By then, the heyday of celebrity impresarios and their dining empires had passed. The internet had changed New York restaurants, especially image-conscious ones like McNally’s, which the public increasingly experienced through screens. An establishment’s gravitational pull now manifested in location tags more than in Page Six mentions. McNally saw an opening for a showman-like restaurateur. His book recounts, in disarming detail, the enthusiasm with which he seized it. Ninety-eight people liked his first Instagram post, he reports: “Getting carried away with myself, I immediately posted ten more.”

In this medium, too, McNally quickly grasped the charm of rough edges—instead of stained walls, there were pixelated screenshots, which appeared on the grid alongside family photos, pop-culture musings, and, in time, end-of-day reports from his restaurants. Social media rewarded what looked like authenticity, which he was ever willing to provide. His posts “dealt with subjects normally taboo on Instagram,” he writes. “Among others, these included regular support for Woody Allen, my vasectomy (with photos), a hatred for the film ‘Barbie’ and the humiliation of my post-stroke physical condition.” The tone could be faintly Trumpian: whimsically capitalized, emphatic, obsessive in the pursuit of nemeses. McNally’s puckish combativeness had found a ready outlet. “James Corden is a Hugely gifted comedian, but a tiny Cretin of a man,” he wrote in a 2022 post calling Corden “the most abusive customer to my Balthazar servers since the restaurant opened 25 years ago.” The result was an outpouring of delighted indignation and anti-Corden sentiment, complete with an extended tabloid news cycle. McNally was intoxicated. “I felt like I’d hit the jackpot of a slot machine and thousands of gold coins were spilling out in front of me,” he recalls. (He now has a hundred and forty-six thousand followers.)

His online life has, at least for some audiences, overshadowed his restaurants. When I told people I was writing about Keith McNally, they were more likely to mention recent posts than recent meals. Reading the memoir is a bit like scrolling through his feed: he’s not really a raconteur, but he’s an energetic collector of rants, vignettes, and curiosities. This isn’t necessarily a strike against the book. If anything, he’s found a new way to give the crowd what it wants. ♦