What Does This Restaurateur, Raconteur and Provocateur Actually Regret?

Keith McNally’s new memoir, “I Regret Almost Everything,” begins at the lowest point of his life, the moment he tried to end it.

In 2018, nearly two years after a pair of strokes ravaged his body and wrecked his marriage, he locked his bedroom door, swallowed a lethal combination of pills, and waited to die. When he woke up — discovered by his son George, who spotted him through a window — he was in the hospital and bound for a psychiatric facility.

A lot has happened to him, and his business, since then. His restaurants closed during the coronavirus pandemic, then reopened in a flurry of social-media attention that felt like a reawakening of sorts for downtown Manhattan. One restaurant, Augustine, shut down for good in 2020; another, Minetta Tavern D.C., opened in 2024. And Mr. McNally became a social media star himself, via his droll, candid and provocative Instagram posts.

Now it’s March 2025, and a thoroughly engaged Mr. McNally, 73, is presiding over a morning meeting at Balthazar, his buzziest restaurant.

Some topics on the menu: people who pretend to be celebrities to get reservations. The 46 bottles of Champagne left over from election night, when Mr. McNally planned to hand out free glasses to celebrate the Kamala Harris victory that never came. A recent incident in which a server had to shield Anna Wintour, a Balthazar regular, from a gaggle of civilians wielding cellphones.

That point prompts some good-natured anecdotage about Ms. Wintour’s talent for inviting attention while exuding an “I-want-to-be-alone” froideur. A manager describes the time he saw a star-struck preteen girl approach her outside the restaurant. “Are you Anna Wintour?” the girl asked. “No,” Ms. Wintour replied.