Keith McNally plans on running his dining rooms from the grave. MatthewSchneier reports on the post-COVID, post-Manhattan plans of the most Manhattan of restaurateurs
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Recent years have been rough on McNally, 70, even as his restaurants continued to sparkle woozily. A stroke in November 2016 left him partially paralyzed and unable to speak clearly . It was followed by a costly divorce from his second wife, Alina, filed in 2018. The comeback plan includes teaming up with Philadelphia megarestaurateur Stephen Starr and others to build near-facsimiles of his very Manhattan bistros in lesser cities.
At Balthazar: Oprah Winfrey and Anna Wintour in 1998, Katie Holmes in 2009, Julianne Moore in 2014, Victoria Beckham in 2016. Photo: Richard Corkery/NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images ; Splash News ; Isak Tiner/The New York Times/Redux . At Balthazar: Oprah Winfrey and Anna Wintour in 1998, Katie Holmes in 2009, Julianne Moore in 2014, Victoria Beckham in 2016. Photo: Richard Corkery/N...
McNally ultimately split off from the Odeon. He admits to having had a “diabolical” relationship with his brother in the past, though he says that has long since ceased. He and Wagenknecht divorced in 1992, though he continues to refer to her as his best friend. But the lessons of those early restaurants informed everything that came next. “His vision is pretty phenomenal,” Richard H. Lewis, an architect who has worked on several of McNally’s restaurants, tells me. “Everything is stage directed.
And then, once you’re seated, there is the matter of the food. It is deliberately not too pretentious or chef-centric. “They’re known for being places where the menus and the food don’t change,” one pastry chef told me about McNally restaurants. “It’s more like hotel cooking — massive batches of things.” “Better than it has to be” is how one major competitor described it to me.
Nor is new funding easy to come by. “Even if you were a proven operator, it was hard to get a loan because everyone in the financial industry knew the shaky financial ground that restaurants were built upon,” David Chang of Momofuku told Fortune last year. And one of McNally’s most stalwart backers, Scholastic CEO Dick Robinson, died in June. Which is why Starr’s big coffers are a big help.
Now Instagram, where he often posts multiple times a day, has given him an even more readily available soapbox, and drama has continued to follow. What began with Woody Allen has expanded to subjects ranging from the vacuity of the Beckhams to favorite dishes and staffers at his four restaurants to defenses of Ghislaine Maxwell’s right to due process. “I’ve always been a critic of my own hypocrisy,” McNally tells me. “My stroke allowed me to be vocal about other people’s.
But if Balthazar’s bookings have suffered as a result of the boss’s postings, Louhaichy says he hasn’t noticed. Even Carter is welcome back, McNally insists, not entirely convincingly: “I never hold grudges.” But others may. McNally mentions Amanda Brooks, the former Barneys fashion director, as a friend he lost after he pointed out a bit of what he saw as her hypocrisy online; she blocked him, he says, and that was that.
Partners have long pushed him to create new colonies elsewhere, just as he is now. “We can help Keith on the West Coast, in Middle America, in Chicago,” the British billionaire Richard Caring, chairman of the group that runs the Ivy restaurants, told New York in 2010, opining that expansion was McNally’s destiny.
“Early on in their career, most rock bands refuse to play their early songs,” McNally philosophizes to me about his change of heart. “At one point, they realize their old songs are nothing to sneeze at and start playing them again. That’s how I feel about building another Balthazar or Minetta Tavern. It took having a stroke for me to appreciate my early restaurants. I’ve nothing in the bank and need to earn money while I still can.
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