I Regret Almost Everything: A Memoir

Successful and polarizing—perhaps we could say successfully polarizing—Keith McNally is the New York restaurateur who helped establish such 80s hotspots as Odeon and Café Luxembourg before moving on to open enduringly popular places like Balthazar and Pastis.

His memoir opens with a quotation from George Orwell which McNally seems to have taken to heart:

Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.

McNally’s own account includes many such revelations in a mixture of audacity, impulsiveness, bold-faced names, snobbery, and self-pillory. “The ease with which I cede integrity and turn into the most awful, groveling, Uriah Heep-type figure makes me wonder if building a restaurant is worth the degradation.”

McNally’s restaurant career dominates the book’s non-linear narrative, but he weaves in everything from his childhood in Britain and his fitful film-making career to his stroke, his suicide attempt, and rocky family relationships.

I Regret Almost Everything is well written; its vigorous voice lacks the sanded-down quality of industry memoirs which carefully avoid offense and, like a lawn sprinkler, distribute drops of appreciative thanks to everyone the author has known. 

Hardcover. Photographic inserts.