My kind of interview: Great subject, no phone involved. And of course erased by the commissioning website.
Thirty years ago this season Keith McNally opened his first restaurant on his own, on a not exactly enticing side street in SoHo. This past summer he and partner Stephen Starr opened a reincarnation of one of his biggest successes in a vastly transformed section of the city, the Meatpacking Mall.
Eat at either Lucky Strike (gone now) or Pastis today and it’s easy to understand the trajectory of the McNally touch that transformed how Manhattan eats. Both restaurants were very new concepts designed to look very old (not for nothing does he so often get dissed for selling “faux glittery bistros” in a country where, as some wit once said, Europe is considered the prototype for Epcot Center). Both drew on the allure of a French brasserie but with menus dipping into the immigrant melting pot and kitchens always delivering faultless pomme frites. And both explain his many successes: While acres of coverage have been devoted to his restaurants as celebrity magnets, the reality is that dweebs and olds (and, sometimes, both) are always made to feel as if they, too, belong. You never had to be a Bret Easton Ellis character to eat at a McNally joint.
The rough template was set at Lucky Strike, which the London immigrant opened after successes at Odeon and Cafe Luxembourg with his brother Brian and then-wife, Lynne Wagenknecht. The late Seymour Britchky, New York’s best-ever restaurant critic, had the perfect description of it: “ramshackle good looks” and “a French bistro in a saloon.” It was there that he conceived of serving wine in water glasses and developed the good bread that would lead to his starting Balthazar Bakery.
Pastis, which he opened 20 years ago, closed in 2014 when the rent got too damn high (the space is now a Restoration Hardware). Now it’s back, not far away on a very changed Gansevoort Street (get there at a good time and you can walk right in, sit right down).
Between Lucky Strike and Pastis, McNally opened Nell’s, Pravda, Schiller’s, Cherche Midi, Balthazar and Augustine. The last, in the Beekman Hotel near Wall Street, is as ever-the-top opulent as Lucky Strike was “ramshackle” — practice makes dramatic perfection. He also revived Minetta Tavern, with a $$ burger that sent a go-high message to so many other restaurateurs.
McNally, who came to New York in that other New York lifetime that was 1975, is now living in London again. He oversees a Balthazar clone there and — as a onetime child actor, feature filmmaker and even farmer — is writing a memoir in the aftermath of a stroke. He answered these questions by email.
Q: How would you describe the restaurant scene when you opened Lucky Strike? And how does it compare with the scene as Pastis has reopened this year?
A: When I opened Lucky Strike 30 years ago it was far easier to build a restaurant than nowadays. There weren’t these absurdly strict health rules that are designed as much to rake in money for the city as to make eating in restaurants safer.
Q: How did you develop what’s been dubbed “the McNally design kit”? Did your work in theater and films have an influence?
A: I wouldn’t exactly call it a “design kit.” I think working in theatre and film brought about my obsession in lighting but, what ideas I get as far as design goes, come from living in Paris and, without wishing to sound pretentious, they also come from a serious interest in architecture and photography.
Q: How did you go from arriving from London in 1975 to opening your first restaurant five years later? What were your first jobs? With immigration under siege, would your story even be possible these days?
A: When I arrived in New York in 1975 I was 24 with vague plans of making films. On my third day I ran out of money and so ditched the film idea and got a job, working illegally, at Serendipity uptown as a busboy. Three months later I left Serendipity to work, again illegally, as an oyster shucker at a new, terrifically stylish place downtown called One Fifth. Television’s “Saturday Night Live” first aired two months before I started at One Fifth, and the cast would hold their famous after-show parties there. I was soon given the dubious job of organising these parties, many of which would last until five in the morning. It was at one of these parties where I met SNL producer, Lorne Michaels who would later invest in two of my restaurants. I also met my future wife, Lynn Wagenknecht, there and together, with my brother Brian – who also worked at One Fifth – decided to build our own restaurant. After I became legal the three of us left One Fifth and found an old cafeteria in Tribeca for rent, which 9 months of renovation and $150,000 later, we named The Odeon.
Q: What was your first restaurant meal, and how did it shape your approach to food and hospitality?
A: I was 17 when I had my first restaurant meal. It was in Soho, London, at a restaurant called Bianchi’s. I was too petrified not to use the wrong cutlery to enjoy the food, or even remember it. The experience only ‘shaped’ my approach to the hospitality business by inspiring me to stay well away from it.
Q: What would you want for your last meal, and where?
A: I would like to eat my last meal at my oldest restaurant, Lucky Strike. I would eat the steak au poivre medium rare and drink my favourite cocktail, a Vanilla Shanti, which is a sensational mix of vanilla vodka, cointreau and a little pineapple juice.
Q: What makes your restaurants such magnets? Is it even explicable? Do you credit your time at One Fifth?
A: Probably it’s a mix of luck and hard work and me not being too visible.
Q: Why did you move back to London? And how difficult is it to oversee your empire from across the water today? (Also: How many employees are involved?)
A: Seven restaurants is definitely not an ’empire’. Without someone as knowledgeable and hard-working as my number two, Roberta Delice, my return to London would never have been possible. I moved back to London for two reasons: I wanted my younger children to have a sense of Europe and my background and because I’m bonkers about English theatre.
Q: How has Balthazar translated to London?
A: I suppose on the surface London’s Balthazar translates reasonably well. Before building the restaurant there, I didn’t realise how much downtown New York shaped the character of Balthazar. If given the choice I wouldn’t build Balthazar in London again.
Q: How did Stephen Starr get involved with Pastis, given that you have been a go-it-aloner for so long? Does he credit you with inspiring some of his own places, like Parc in Philadelphia and Le Diplomate in Washington?
A: Stephen Starr became my partner because once I had a stroke my original investor of Pastis, the CEO of Scholastic, Dick Robinson, pulled out. Luckily my daughter, Sophie, who was running for the financial side of my restaurants at the time introduced me to Stephen, whom I liked instantly.
On our third meeting Stephen thanked me for making him so much money from Le Diplomate and Parc which, until then, I’d never heard of. But I like Stephen’s restaurants, Le Coucou and Le Mercier, a lot.
Q: How did you come to open Augustine, which seems to cater to a specific clientele (aka Wall Street) rather than the mix of nobodies and somebodies at your other restaurants?
A: I was offered the Augustine space and liked it. Like all my restaurants I never ‘target’ any specific clientele.
Q: Not trying to elicit any emotions in fraught times, but do you think you could have made your career/empire anywhere but New York? Or in any country besides the United States?
A: No, not at all! Some English restaurants are really great, but, in general, English restauranteurs are a petty and xenophobic lot. I would never open another restaurant there.
Q: You also put in time as a farmer, on Martha’s Vineyard. What did you learn from that experience? What lessons can restaurateurs take from that?
A: I’m not sure that I learned anything from my poor attempt at farming except that farming organically is double blessed: a blessing for the environment and a blessing for the soul of the farmer. I learned to make cheese from milking my goats and also grow tomatoes from seeds. The thing with growing your own food is that everything comes at once! I wish one could alter nature so that vegetables grew at the rate one eats them.
Q: I understand Lucky Strike was the genesis of the bread that built Balthazar Bakery. How did that evolve? What other innovations did you develop there?
A: My interest in bread came from my friendship with Eli Zabar. (We’ve since become estranged as most friends of Eli’s eventually do!) Because I became obsessed with bread I took a bread-baking class at the New School and learned just enough to know I was no good at it. So when Lucky Strike opened I hired two people who were good at it: Sim Case and Mark Tasker (Tasker is now the head pastry chef at Balthazar) and things progressed from there. But I owe my interest in bread to Eli.
Q: How has the labor shortage affected hiring? Are you taking on older servers where once the young and the hip were the ideal?
A: I always tried to hire older, unfashionable servers but twenty years ago only very beautiful hip servers were available, so I had no choice. Fortunately, these days the labor shortage has prompted all the older, demonstrably un-hip servers out of hiding so, thank God, they’re nowadays available.
Q: How important do you think newspaper and magazine restaurant reviewers are in this heyday of social media, with everyone a critic?
A: Still important but far less so, especially to those under 40.
Q: Your places are known as much for the mix of people as for the design and food. Is that still possible as New York City gets pricier?
A: It’s harder since astronomical rents have forced half the people under 30 to move to the boroughs. As a result, most of New York’s more interesting restaurants are there too.
Q: Schiller’s Liquor Bar was such an amazement, and not just as depicted in Richard Price’s “Lush Life.” Why do you think it was it one of your rare failures?
A: Schiller’s was open for 14 years and made a substantial profit. If that’s a failure I’d like more of them. I’ve certainly had my share of failures where I lost millions, but Schiller’s wasn’t one of them.
Q: Your restaurants have always been known more for you than for their chefs. Has that been elemental to their longevity? What’s your thinking on the whole kitchen celebrity culture, with food festivals seemingly never ending?
A: The chefs I most admire tend to be – like most good craftsmen – uncomfortable with the celebrity aspect of the job.
Q: Pulino’s and its successor, Cherche Midi, also both did not last. Do you think the location was a problem? Did the neighborhood not evolve as others have for you?
A: When a restaurant doesn’t work, the owner invariably blames the location. In the case of Pulino’s and Cherche-Midi it was 100 percent my fault. They just weren’t good enough. Saying that, Cherche Midi was one of my favourite restaurants.
Q: How did you settle on the location of Lucky Strike in SoHo? Do you have any criteria for where to develop new places? Beyond Cafe Luxembourg, why never on the Upper West Side (where I just happen to live)?
A: In the late seventies and early eighties another restaurant was in the same spot. It was called La Gamelle, and it was famous for being open until 4 a.m. I liked it a lot and would hang out there after work. In May 1989 someone told me it was closing. So Lynn Wagenknecht and I took over the lease and with a friend, Ed Youkilis, changed it probably more than the place needed. But we were careful not to destroy La Gamelle’s spirit. We then brought in two working partners and opened it as Lucky Strike.
I haven’t opened another restaurant on the Upper West Side simply because, though I like the Upper West Side, I don’t know it. I have no connection to it. More and more I believe to get the right spirit, you can only open restaurants in areas you have a real connection to.
Q: Everyone is so bleak on the future of restaurants in Manhattan, and chefs are even fleeing Brooklyn for cities like Portland, Maine. What’s your take? Justifiably so?
A: Yes, I definitely agree with this. When I was starting out in 1980 restaurant owners expected the rent to be 7 percent or less of the gross. In Manhattan today it’s expected to be 14 or 15 percent. That’s why the young and the talented can no longer open restaurants in Manhattan, and as a consequence the more vital and interesting places today are outside Manhattan. Only those with deep pockets and few ideas can afford to open restaurants in Manhattan today, including myself. When I opened Lucky Strike 30 years ago I was the opposite.
Q: How would you describe the restaurant scene when you opened Lucky Strike 30 years ago? And how does it compare with the scene as Pastis has reopened this year?
A: When I first began building Pastis in 1998 the Meatpacking District was an intriguing mix of transvestites and meat purveyors. Apart from the six-foot transvestites roaming its streets at night, the area was so bleak and empty after dark one had the ghostly feeling of being at the world’s end. I loved it.
With the exception of the Highline and the stunning new Whitney, unstoppable greed has transformed the meatpacking district into the kind of high-end shopping mall one often finds in Dubai. Restoration Hardware, which replaced the original Pastis, had gone and imposed above its 19th-century facade a hideous-looking structure which, if anything, resembles plastic surgery gone haywire. But considering Pastis was partly responsible for triggering the change it’s perhaps hypocritical of me to now criticize this change. But I triggered the change inadvertently, not deliberately.
Q: Lastly, a silly question: How many frites orders do you think all your restaurants have served over the last 30 years?
A: 1 million, 250 thousand. (Answering this question took ten times as long as answering of all the other questions combined!).