Keith McNally in Conversation on "I Regret Almost Everything"

About This Program

He invented downtown New York as we know it. Now he’s telling the whole story: the glamour, the chaos, the strokes of luck, and the ones that nearly killed him.

Join New York Times best-selling author and legendary restaurateur Keith McNally for an intimate conversation about his life and work, including his memoir, I Regret Almost Everything. The man behind Balthazar, Pastis, Minetta Tavern, and a dozen other era-defining New York institutions takes us from a gritty London childhood to his serendipitous arrival in New York, and through everything that followed: the restaurants, the films, the wives and children, the Instagram notoriety, and the devastating stroke he somehow survived with his opinions fully intact.

Eloquent, irreverent, and surprisingly moving, McNally has lived a life that reads like fiction. This is your chance to hear him tell it.

Moderator to be announced. Books will be available for purchase and signing.

About the Book

I Regret Almost Everything has been called “jaw-dropping” by the Times, “intensely readable” by the FT, and “magical, tender, revealing, rude, honest, very funny and very vulnerable” by Bill Buford. Anna Wintour calls it “moving and poignant.” Jay McInerney calls it “engrossing, fearless and ultimately very moving.” Padma Lakshmi calls it “an incredible life, recounted with wit, humility and a surprising amount of vulnerability.”

Don’t take their word for it. Come hear it from the man himself.

About Keith McNally

Keith McNally is the restaurateur The New York Times called “The Man Who Invented Downtown.” His memoir, I Regret Almost Everything, is a New York Times best-seller and the winner of the 2026 Gotham Book Prize. He is also the author of The Balthazar Cookbook and Schiller’s Liquor Bar Cocktail Collection, and the writer and director of two feature films, End of the Night and Far from Berlin.

Born in London, he arrived in New York in 1975 and worked his way up from oyster-shucker and busboy before opening The Odeon in 1980, and never really stopped. He went on to found Cafe Luxembourg, Nell’s, Lucky Strike, Pravda, Balthazar, Balthazar Bakery, Pastis, Schiller’s Liquor Bar, Morandi, Minetta Tavern, and Cherche Midi, among others, as well as Balthazar in London, plus the staggeringly unsuccessful pizzeria, Pulino’s. In 2010 he was, by his own account, mistakenly given the James Beard Award for Outstanding U.S. Restaurateur. He lives in downtown New York.