‘Most dinner parties end up in fights with my wife. By the end of the evening, we are totally estranged. I read about these beautiful couples that have effortless dinner parties, but that’s not us,’ says Keith McNally. Coping with several thousand strangers a day in his New York restaurants Balthazar, Morandi, Pastis and the Minetta Tavern is easy, but entertaining friends at home can be problematic. He thinks it may have something to do with his childhood, growing up in a working class British family where food and fighting were inextricably linked. ‘We had no TV, so terrific rows at the dinner table were our main form of entertainment.’
McNally grew up in a family of six in the East End of London. His father was a dockworker and his mother an office cleaner. ‘Expecting mother to select four French cheeses would be like expecting Robinson Crusoe to shop at Gucci’. Most of her dishes were so over cooked, ‘the meat looked like Keith Richards skin on a really bad day’. Going out to restaurants was, ‘an exercise in humiliation. Getting to the table, knowing what do with the silverware and what things meant on the menu, was terrifying.’
Despite his constant protestations about his own poor cooking skills and his low expectations of his own dinner parties, McNally and his wife Alina appear to have a lot of fun preparing lunch for friends in their 1841 West Village town house.
Today, the guests include art critic Robert Hughes, who McNally has known since the 70s, and who wrote the introduction to his Balthazar cookbook. ‘If we have any plates that are not chipped that would be great!’ McNally shouts over to his assistant, adding. ‘And I think we need a bigger table cloth!’ He has produced a tiny square no bigger than a hanky and plopped it down in the middle of his dining table, a green distressed wood affair surrounded by French café chairs. It is a joke.
What McNally really wants is to have no fuss and no pretension. No table cloth at all in fact, and his lunch guests will drink wine out of Duralit glass tumblers. ‘It is a lot less formal,’ he says by way of explanation. ‘Precious food on large plates that is arranged artfully, is not for me. I like good food, but I don’t like a ceremony.’
The lunch preparations started the day before with a trip to Di Paolo’s, a lively Italian deli that’s been a staple on the Lower East Side for over a 100 years. McNally dropped in to buy Burrata with truffles (a soft Italian cheese shaped like a gourd and wrapped in banana leaves), which along with peppers, ricotta and toast will be the first course.
DiPaolo’s is only a few blocks away from his longest running hit, Balthazar, a vast Bofinger-style brasserie in SoHo. When it first opened in 1997, it received 4,000 calls a day for its 165 tables. The 90s A list – Calvin Klein, Anna Wintour, Sharon Stone, Kate Moss had to fight each other to get in.
His latest hit Minetta Tavern describes itself on its website as having been ‘frequented by various layabouts and hangers-on including Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, Eugene O’Neill, E. E. Cummings, Dylan Thomas, and Joe Gould, as well as by various writers, poets, and pugilists.’ It is now a place for young celebrities, like Taylor Swift and Phoebe Bridgers. The food is unabashedly McNally. Diners can have the time warp experience of eating old school French culinary fare like escargot vol au vents, seared foie gras and soupe a l’oignon, or they can enjoy Italian pasta dishes like housemade pappardelle with short ribs, or luxed up American staples like the Black Label Burger, made from ‘a selection of prime dry aged beef cuts’.
One of the first guests to arrive for McNally’s home-cooked lunch is British TV and radio presenter Kirsty Young, who is a big fan of Balthazar. ‘I just love the theatre of it. It is such a great space,’ she says, lounging in the living room drinking Agrapart brut non vintage champagne and nibbling on chunks of Parmesan from Di Paolo’s and slivers of finely sliced prosciutto.
The ground floor of McNally’s townhouse is one vast open kitchen/living space. The walls have been plastered in a dense egg-custard plaster that looks like it was applied with a spade. Like his restaurants, every detail of his home is minutely considered. But the result isn’t precious. Quite the opposite, it is designed to look relaxed and is extremely tolerant of mess and disorder. Even his glass-fronted fridge gives a view into joyful chaos, ‘There are chunks of butter from World War 2 and take-out dinners from restaurants that closed four months ago’ he jokes. ‘I don’t care what people think.’
Architect and screenwriter James Sanders turns up next. He is a regular at the McNally’s and says that guests typically pop in and out throughout the evening. Some come for the hors d’oeuvres and then vanish, and others appear at the end. McNally chimes in, ‘I just tell those who can’t make dinner to turn up for dessert’.
Lunch starts with a toast to Robert Hughes to thank him for doing the introduction to the Balthazar cookbook. McNally gets up and says; ‘Although Bob’s essay was lovely. We are not using it’. The lunch party erupts in guffaws.
Alina sits at one end of the table and at the other end is Anna Opitz, who in the 1990s co-owned with McNally the vodka bar Pravda [now closed]. The host is perched on a corner, so he won’t dominate the table and so he can bob back and forth to the kitchen and not be too distracting.
The main course of striped bass with tomato and saffron and fennel confit is lifted from his Balthazar cookbook and is, ‘A bit more precious than I would usually do,’ he says. ‘I usually prefer to cook any dish that makes me appear a better cook than I am,’ he jokes. A current favorite is combining grilled eggplant, watermelon and tapenade with fresh chevre that he makes from his own goats milk on his farm in Martha’s Vineyard.
When the cake appears, McNally asks who has the nearest birthday and they get to cut it. It is a massive lemon cake soaked in rum, plastered with fresh cream and studded with fruit. It was made in McNally’s bakery in Englewood New Jersey, which produces 7,500 loaves of bread a day, plus pastries and fancy cakes, sometimes for friends and celebrity weddings.
By 4.30pm, both the front and back doors are wide open and the late afternoon sunlight is streaming in. The guests are only just starting to dribble out. ‘It has been a great lunch. You can tell when they don’t get up immediately after the coffee,’ McNally explains. Contrary to his worst fears, there was no postprandial fight with Alina, no embarrassed guests leaving early, no culinary cock-ups. ‘I don’t know why we don’t do this more often,’ he says.
UPDATE: Keith McNally and Alina divorced in 2018.
Lucie Young 