Book Review: Restaurateur Keith McNally opens up in candid memoir 'I Regret Almost Everything'

Keith McNally has been charming New York City diners since he opened his first restaurant, The Odeon, in 1980, helping transform a then-derelict TriBeCa into a hotspot for the “glitterati.”

The Odeon's glowing neon sign was featured on the cover of Jay McInerney’s 1984 novel “Bright Lights, Big City,” and the restaurant was a regular hangout for celebrities from Andy Warhol to John Belushi.

Nearly five decades and 19 restaurants later, McNally’s Balthazar in SoHo, Minetta Tavern in New York and D.C., and other restaurants are still going strong. In his candid, funny and poignant memoir, “I Regret Almost Everything,” McNally, 73, shows that he is, too.

But it might not have been that way. The book opens with a 2018 suicide attempt, sparked by back pain, a crumbling marriage and the aftereffects of a 2016 stroke which left him with aphasia and a paralyzed right hand.

Work — building and operating restaurants — helped keep him going. And with his speech distorted, he found a creative outlet in Instagram, where his filter-free screeds on everything — from dealing with his stroke to Balthazar’s evening recap by staff — often go viral.

“In some ways, it was only after I lost my voice that I learned to speak my mind,” he writes.

In his memoir, McNally charts his unlikely success story from a working-class teen actor raised in Bethnal Green, London, to being dubbed “The Restaurateur Who Invented Downtown” in his heyday of the 1980s and ’90s.

His exacting eye for lighting and ambiance and charming touches in his restaurants — he sends a gratis glass of champagne to solo diners at Balthazar, and often filled the “cheap” $15 carafe of wine at the now-defunct Schiller's with his finest bottles — have turned countless customers into regulars at his establishments.

McNally’s memoir lets readers sidle up to the bar and feel like regulars in his life, too.

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McNally is known for his famous restaurants and his many unfiltered comments. Someone said that "scandal seems to follow him everywhere." With this book, we discover Keith McNally, a talented writer. The book is a memoir, probably, prompted by the debilitating stroke he suffered several years ago. His book, however, is in no way depressing, it is rather invigorating. The book is raw, honest, introspective, shocking at times, as he promised, and entertaining. His reflections force you to consider your life, too. Reading the book, you meet not a scandal-prone celebrity but a genuinely interesting person. Highly recommended.

I was counting down the days until I was able to read I Regret Almost Everything. The author has been very open about his life experiences after two serious strokes on Instagram and I was looking forward to reading his writings in a longer format. It turns out, I read this book after my father suffered a serious health issue resulting in mobility issues causing me to empathize with Keith McNally even more so. This book reflects what I assume to be an expression of the memories and experiences in his life that are most meaningful to him at this time including two divorces, the building of multiple restaurants, and the renovation of different homes. Highly recommend for readers interested in self-reflection and narrative arcs. As a note, the author does reflect on suicidal ideation.