I Regret Almost Everything

How do you rebuild a life when the tools you use to be yourself suddenly fail? In this memoir of creation and collapse, Keith McNally argues that you remake identity through work, place, and relationship—especially when your body and voice no longer cooperate. A restaurateur known for the Odeon, Balthazar, and Pastis, McNally suffers a devastating stroke at the National Gallery in London while looking at Caravaggio’s The Taking of Christ. Overnight, he loses command of the right side of his body and, cruelly for a public ringmaster, his fluency with language. From there the book traces a double arc: the medical journey of rehabilitation and the creative labor of remaking restaurants, each informing the other.

A self shattered by illness

Catastrophe strikes in an ordinary moment—a tingling that climbs from fingertips to face, an ambulance, then Charing Cross Hospital and a blunt verdict: you’ve had a stroke. Aphasia and dysarthria make words prisoners; speech becomes slurred, sequencing falters, and arithmetic evaporates. McNally, who once built rooms with conversation and authority, wakes to a world where even counting plates is hard. Shame follows—about being seen disabled by his children, about dependence—and despair culminates in a suicide attempt months later with Ambien and Percocet. You watch identity, once propped up by talk and movement, implode in hours.

Rehabilitation as daily labor

Recovery is not cinematic. It is repetitive, relational, and humbling. McNally grinds through physiotherapy and occupational therapy at St. John & St. Elizabeth in London, and later programs at NewYork–Presbyterian. Neuroplasticity repairs, but it does not restore perfectly; the first six months matter most, and repetition is king. A cast of helpers—Freddy the orderly with homespun aphorisms, Abi the nurse whose steadiness keeps morale intact, and Martin Spollen reciting Shakespeare while stretching a calf—reminds you that rehab is as human as it is technical. Milestones arrive late: the first six steps with a cane after weeks of gait training; typing left-handed when the right hand refuses.

Restaurants as identity, risk, and art

For McNally, restaurants are not simply businesses; they are rooms where he performs a self, fuses taste with theater, and gives strangers a script for pleasure. That fusion is power and vulnerability. Without a resilient managerial spine, a personality-driven empire wilts when the personality is compromised. The Pastis lease—with a 1 million dollar personal guarantee—feels safe when healthy but catastrophic after the stroke. Augustine, his most dazzling room, overruns by 3 million dollars and may even contribute to the arterial strain that precedes disaster. You learn that aesthetic success does not equal financial resilience; charisma and improvisation light the match, but process and structure keep the house from burning down.

Design by correction

McNally builds rooms the way painters revise canvases: he starts with a vivid seed and then corrects in situ. Balthazar begins with a fleamarket photo of a zinc bar and caryatids, then becomes a SoHo cathedral in the old Adar Tannery. Two of five enormous windows are walled off and replaced with mirrors to keep the room self-contained. Brandt Junceau sculpts the caryatids; salvaged French luggage racks lose their beloved patina when a dealer polishes them bright—an irreversible mistake that becomes a lesson in protecting character. Lighting, discovered at One Fifth, is the room’s soul: many low-watt sources at the side seduce better than any spotlight. (Note: This echoes Danny Meyer’s hospitality doctrine, but McNally roots it more in room physics than pure service philosophy.)

Operations and culture you can feel

The glamour of dining depends on invisible rituals—hiring sprees, training manuals, phrases that tell staff how to think. Balthazar’s manual says say we have, not I have, repeat orders back, attend to the partner of the famous guest, and anticipate needs without hovering. Friction with chefs (Nasr and Hanson) over volume versus quality teaches a durable truth: throughput and craft must be balanced structurally and socially. Mistakes require moral calculus, as when an 18 dollar pinot is poured for brokers expecting a 2,000 dollar Mouton Rothschild; McNally tells the truth and lets the unknowing couple keep their windfall.

Anchor line

'Work—of any kind—provides the one thing we need to keep going: a sense of purpose.'

Partners, family, and the public square

Capital and property come with human temperaments attached: Dick Robinson’s patient trust contrasts with Richard Caring’s ruthless moves in London; Bill Gottlieb’s eccentric preservation gifts Pastis its home. Meanwhile, class origins in Bethnal Green, mentors like Alan Bennett, and two marriages (Lynn Wagenknecht; Alina) braid ambition with regret. Children—Harry, Sophie, Isabelle, George, and Alice—bear the cost of public triumphs and private failures. In later years, Instagram becomes McNally’s prosthetic voice and peril, with the James Corden episode proving how quickly validation and backlash travel. Covid tests everything—cash flows, solidarity, and the meaning of reopening—turning Balthazar’s 2021 return into a civic ritual.

What you take away

Read this as a manual in remaking a self: accept that disaster can erase your scripts; rebuild through small, repeated work; design rooms that feel inevitable but were born of correction; professionalize what personality once covered; invest in staff rituals and investor diligence; and treat reputation as both ballast and sail. Above all, keep doing the work—because purpose, not miracle medicine, is the scaffold on which the rest of your life will hang. (In When Breath Becomes Air, Paul Kalanithi argues for meaning through vocation; McNally shows how to keep working when the instrument—your brain—misfires.)

McNally’s stroke lands with ungentle clarity: metallic tingling, ambulance, Charing Cross Hospital, and the pronouncement that the brain will never be the same. What breaks is not only motor control on the right side but speech—aphasia and dysarthria reduce fluent leadership to effortful syllables. You feel the humiliation of suddenly being a burden to your children and the shame of being seen diminished. This is where the book’s central ethic appears: recovery is labor, not epiphany.

Convalescence vs rehabilitation

McNally distinguishes passive healing (convalescence: sleep, time, rest) from active, goal-directed retraining (rehabilitation: drills, repetition, measured challenges). The first keeps you alive; the second makes you useful again. The NHS, under strain, moves him out quickly; private care at St. John & St. Elizabeth supplies intensity at a cost. You learn a structural lesson: health systems set the stage, but your daily grind writes the script.

The grind of neuroplasticity

Rewiring is slow. Electrical stimulation tries to wake a paralyzed hand. Gait training turns two hours a day into a few steps with a cane. Speech returns in shards, helped by family—Harry coaxing words with patience you can feel across the page. Martin Spollen sneaks Shakespeare into calf stretches; Abi the nurse holds dignity steady; Freddy the orderly reframes pain with wit. The message: repetition and relationships wire together.

When hope turns predatory

Desperation invites charlatans. In San Diego, miracle rhetoric costs 7,000 dollars and yields nothing. A stem-cell trial in Chicago, by contrast, is risky science with consent and humility: drill a hole in the skull, inject cells, and wait, knowing it’s no panacea. You develop a protective rule of thumb: real medicine acknowledges limits; scams guarantee miracles. (Note: This mirrors Atul Gawande’s caution that uncertainty is medicine’s native terrain.)

The psychological cliff

Sleeplessness, painkillers, and humiliation pull McNally toward the edge. On Martha’s Vineyard he empties Ambien and Percocet into a bowl. Surviving brings him to McLean Hospital—first the rough SB1 ward, then two months at the Pavilion. Therapy, meds, and the bluntness of psychiatric care do their quiet work. The book refuses sentimentality: depression does not lift because you are talented; it lifts because structure returns.

Recovery’s hinge

'Work—of any kind—provides the one thing we need to keep going: a sense of purpose.'

Work as therapy

Post-McLean, Pastis becomes a lifeline. Arguing with Stephen Starr about booth sizes, walking a floor plan, and drafting a training manual return a measure of agency. Even if words come slowly, reputation carries intent across the room. The lesson for you is practical: rebuild a daily scaffold—sleep, therapy, movement, meaningful work. Recruit a small circle who can speak for you when you cannot. Expect backsliding and plateaus; measure success in inches, not miles.

How to apply it

If catastrophe hits you or someone you love: separate convalescence from rehabilitation; start repetitive, achievable tasks early; identify one or two therapists who blend technique with humanity; beware any clinic promising dramatic timelines; and create micro-purposes linked to your identity. A restaurateur can still edit lighting and rehearse greetings even when speech is broken. A coder can still sketch logic flows when typing is slow. Your former craft becomes the rehab tool that returns you to yourself.

McNally teaches you how to turn an evocative image into a living room that changes how people feel. He starts with romance and ends with correction. Balthazar’s origin is a fleamarket photograph of a grand zinc bar with caryatids. Years later, the old Adar Tannery in SoHo offers the vertical space to match the dream. From there, the method is surgical: build, inspect, and correct until the room behaves.

Start with a seed, expect to correct

McNally admits that plans leak the first day of construction. He cannot fully visualize until he sees mass in place. At Balthazar he counters conventional wisdom by blocking two of five enormous windows and replacing them with mirrors so the room feels self-contained. He commissions Brandt Junceau to sculpt the caryatids and, in a choice he notes would be untenable now, asks waitresses to model topless—an artifact of a different workplace era. You learn to expect ethical, aesthetic, and logistical trade-offs in real time.

Light is the room’s voice

After a hard lesson at One Fifth, McNally develops a lighting creed: many low-watt sources, mostly at the sides, to flatten imperfections and warm faces. This is the cheapest, highest-leverage design lever you will ever touch. Tiles and mirrors do the rest: cream-and-blue patterns at Café Luxembourg, pink-tinted mirrors salvaged from New Jersey for the Odeon, and a neon clock from New Orleans that sets time as theater. The terrazzo floor that once felt wrong becomes, by acceptance, the room’s accidental triumph.

Patina vs polish

Sourcing antiques is emotional craft. In French salvage yards McNally treasures luggage racks scarred by use; a yard owner polishes them back to showroom bright and destroys the history that made them sing. You understand why patina is not dirt but memory. Once removed, it cannot be restored. The room’s credibility relies on such small, irreversible things—door handles, banquettes, the gloss of a bar top. (Note: This resonates with John Berger’s insistence that use changes how we see.)

Place as teacher

SoHo’s cast-iron facades, the Paris Bar’s salon-style hang, and Martha’s Vineyard’s uncommercial quiet form McNally’s grammar of space. Even as he rails against the word art, he collects over two hundred paintings, buying a de Vlaminck to impress, then selling it at a loss. The contradiction helps you: design elevates and also masks insecurity. Admit both, and you will choose more honestly.

From object to behavior

Design choices should shape how people act. Mirrors instead of windows keep diners in the fiction of the room. Tight booth radii encourage intimate posture. A zinc bar suggests speed and conviviality. These are not backdrops; they are behavioral cues. McNally’s restaurants—Odeon’s pink haze, Pravda’s ice-cold martinis, Minetta’s moody wood—prove that coherent atmosphere becomes brand memory people will pay to re-experience.

How you can use this

Pick a single ground-note—tile, light, or mirror—and let it dictate the rest. Do not over-polish away history. Expect to rip out something you once swore by. Test with bodies, not renderings. Budget for correction. And remember that the cheapest magic is light: put it low, multiply its sources, and let the room speak in a whisper instead of a shout.

The visible magic of hospitality sits on an invisible lattice of rules, tone, and training. McNally opens Balthazar by hiring an army—managers, bartenders, baristas, servers, bussers, hosts—to serve 180 seats twice a day, seven days a week. Ten days before opening, he issues a training manual that acts as a constitution. You watch language, small courtesies, and moral choices turn into culture customers can feel.

Write the culture down

The manual codifies habits that seem tiny but add up. Say we have, not I have, to honor the kitchen. Repeat orders back. Anticipate without hovering. Attend to the partner at a famous person’s table. Seed humor to reduce stiffness. These aren’t checkboxes; they are a theory of human interaction. McNally’s approach echoes service playbooks from luxury hotels but without stiffness: he pushes for intimacy, not deference.

Calibrating speed and craft

Opening crush reveals a structural fault-line: McNally prizes a full book; chefs Riad Nasr and Lee Hanson fear quality collapse. This is a classic throughput-craft dilemma. His solution mixes respect and redundancy—adding a second chef and moderating covers to protect execution. You learn to listen when the kitchen says enough: physics, not ego, should set capacity.

Service truth

'Good service is based on anticipation. This does not mean hovering over the table.'

How to handle errors

Mistakes test character. When an 18 dollar pinot noir is decanted and served to traders who ordered a 2,000 dollar Mouton Rothschild, McNally levels with them and allows the young couple who actually received the Mouton to keep it. This costs money and earns trust. You see the rule: tell the truth with tact; protect dignity where possible; accept losses that preserve integrity. Staff will copy whichever choice you make.

Rituals that travel

Small, repeatable gestures scale humanity. A discreet glass of champagne to a solo diner. A quiet check-in instead of the script how is everything. Managers walking the floor to sense temperature, not just to police. These are the moments that turn procedures into affection. They also carry a leader’s voice on days when that voice is literally unreliable—as after McNally’s stroke.

Your playbook

If you run any service business: write down your language; train to behaviors, not just tasks; set capacity by the bottleneck you respect most; build an error-response protocol that puts truth before revenue; and craft two or three signature rituals that make your culture legible to strangers. The goal is not to impress but to create reliable warmth under pressure.

McNally’s rooms glow because other people provide capital and property. That interdependence is the career’s engine and its hazard. Investors and landlords show you that deals are moral relationships wrapped in contracts. The smart move is to vet people as carefully as numbers and to design continuity plans that outlive health, scandal, or betrayal.

Angels and pit bulls

Dick Robinson, Scholastic’s CEO, funds Balthazar with 2.5 million dollars and later backs Pastis, Schiller’s, Morandi, and a bakery—largely on trust and quiet presence. Bill Gottlieb, an eccentric preservationist landlord, withholds and then grants the space that becomes Pastis, shaping a whole neighborhood by accident. On the other hand, Richard Caring launches Balthazar London and later cuts McNally out of profits and buys Pastis rights in maneuvers McNally calls ruthless. The message: temperament is a line-item; price it in.

Risk without ballast

McNally signs a Pastis lease with a 1 million dollar personal guarantee—sensible when healthy, terrifying after a stroke. Augustine overruns by 3 million dollars and may tie to the violent coughing fit that tears an artery. Film ventures swing wider still: End of the Night reaches Cannes to shrugs; Far From Berlin burns 4 million dollars and scorches a marriage. You cannot miss the pattern: bold bets win culture and cost security. At 50 he learns the difference between gross and net; that’s a parable, not a punchline.

Continuity as design problem

A personality-driven empire collapses if the person collapses. McNally’s stroke exposes the absence of a layered managerial structure. The fix is unglamorous: a chair who can sign leases, a CFO fluent in covenants, an operator like Roberta Delice who can carry a room; legal rights that keep names and IP from walking; succession plans rehearsed, not imagined. Think of continuity like lighting—cheap compared to catastrophe, and everything looks better when it’s right.

Negotiating throughput and brand

Stephen Starr’s partnership to relaunch Pastis after the stroke shows the value of a shrewd operator whose systems match McNally’s taste. You watch how arguments over booth sizes and menu pacing are really arguments over brand memory. Cashflow loves turns; reputation loves lingering. Sustainable profit sits where those curves cross. (Note: This echoes the Lean Startup idea of validated learning, except here the KPI is felt reputation, not just revenue.)

Your checklist

Before you sign the next lease or accept capital: underwrite the partner’s character; map worst-case health and liquidity shocks; separate personal guarantees from corporate risk; document IP ownership and dispute paths; and identify two people who can run your day-to-day without you. Reputation may bring you back after disaster, but structure keeps you from vanishing when disaster arrives.

Behind the rooms sit early rooms: a prefab in Bethnal Green; a father, Jack, who is steady and inexpressive; a mother, Joyce, whose literate volatility teaches both sensitivity to words and the cost of feuds. Brothers Peter and Brian mix fear and admiration; rivalry spills into public life. These origins—class shame, stoicism, a hunger for recognition—seed a career that turns taste into theater and leaves a wake of regret.

Mentors who rewire taste

Alan Bennett arrives first as lover and then lifelong friend, modeling restraint and humane judgment. Jonathan Miller shows how ideas connect across disciplines; Tom Stoppard’s precise theatricality provides companionship through McNally’s recovery with letters and invitations. Add Mr. Williams, the teacher who made Shakespeare hard work and therefore worth it. You see how a network can replace formal education and plant the instincts that later make a room feel right.

Two marriages, five children, many debts

Marriage to Lynn Wagenknecht yields Harry, Sophie, and Isabelle and foundational rooms—Odeon, Café Luxembourg, Nell’s. Later marriage to Alina brings George and Alice and new tension. Divided loyalties harden into estrangements that a stroke magnifies. Isabelle’s long struggle with depression, George’s slump after the stroke, and Alice’s distance make clear that professional splendor offers no insulation. McNally admits a bleak refrain: I regret almost everything—especially small cruelties and absences that compounded over time.

Public platforms and their price

After the stroke, Instagram becomes a prosthetic voice. McNally posts managerial anecdotes and provocations; the James Corden incident spikes followers and tests discipline. The platform gives back power and sharpens exposure. Reputation, which once lived in dining rooms, now lives on screens as well. The double edge is clear: amplification without verification breeds punishment without proportion.

Covid as civic theater

Covid shutters rooms and tests rent rolls, nerves, and solidarity. Landlords ease terms; critics suspend star systems; peers coordinate. When Balthazar reopens in 2021, the night feels like VE Day—proof that restaurants are more than commerce; they are urban lungs. You learn to stage a reopening as ritual, not transaction, because people need ceremonies of return.

What this means for you

Attend to relationships while you build; small neglects become structural cracks. Establish boundaries and verification habits before posting publicly. When crisis arrives—personal or global—design communal moments that acknowledge loss and affirm continuity. Your public self is always bargaining with your private debts; the best you can do is make the bargain conscious and humane.