Mr. McNally brings a sense of racy fun to his restaurants, offering a free glass of Champagne to solo diners at Balthazar, for instance. This can sometimes complicate matters for the staff, as when he announced in 2023 that he would provide free lasagna to customers at Morandi on Sundays after 5 p.m. for a month.
“Sometimes he doesn’t tell us what he’s doing,” said John Boy, a longtime employee who works as the assistant reservations manager, among other things. “People were cheating the system by coming in for brunch and staying until dinner.”
Mr. McNally has also been perhaps too liberal in disseminating his restaurants’ special reservations number, which gives priority treatment to customers ranked by three categories of importance — A, AA and AAA. The lowest category, A, now encompasses tens of thousands of people, John Boy said.
“A lot of people say, ‘We’re on Keith’s list,’ but sometimes it seems like everybody’s on Keith’s list,” he said.
Love to Hate
Mr. McNally’s suicide attempt, now eight years ago, was not a cry for help, he said, but a genuine desire for oblivion. “I really didn’t want to be here,” he said. Similarly, his subsequent embrace of life was an active decision rather than a default position. “Partly it was that I didn’t want my kids to see me that way,” he said. Hauntingly, he added, “someone told me that the children of people who kill themselves have a higher rate of suicide.”
What animates him are the things he loves — but also the things that make him furious.
He gave some examples (and there are more in his book). Hypocrisy. President Trump and how he treated the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, in the Oval Office. The “really nasty” article Michael Wolff wrote in 2013 about Christopher Hitchens, whom Mr. McNally loved. Self-regarding puffery. Pomposity. The word “restaurateur.”
Above all, he added, he hates phoniness and pretension and hopes that’s not how he comes across.
“My biggest fear is being too full of myself,” he said.
