Paris is a city of great pleasures, but one of the best is sitting on the exterior terrace of a cafe, drinking something delicious, and puffing away on a cigar. It’s a pretty complete experience — two kinds of intoxicants entering the bloodstream, the bustle and hum of the city as it passes by, the nearly constant distinctive police car klaxon honking away in the distance. But what really makes it so enjoyable is what you don’t experience.
No one complains about the swirling cloud of cigar smoke that envelops the nearby tables. No one coughs ostentatiously or calls over the waiter to demand that you stop. Even in places that are overrun with tourists, it’s as if everyone just gets what Paris is all about: sitting, smoking, drinking, and staring into the middle distance, wearing a happy-sad smile. Or engrossed in a book, which is what I was doing last week in Paris.
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My friend Keith McNally, the owner and impresario of a string of dynamite, mostly New York-based restaurants, including Minetta Tavern, Pastis, Miranda, and the glamorous beehive Balthazar, wrote a barnburner of a memoir, I Regret Almost Everything. It’s a ferociously honest and witty history of his life, from working-class roots in the bleak black-and-white movie of post-war England to the technicolor excesses of 1980s Manhattan. Most people know him from his scandalously frank (and mostly politically incorrect) Instagram account, where he pretty much says whatever is on his mind and engages in hilarious, acid rants against certain entitled celebrities, rude customers who don’t tip his beloved staff, and other assorted metropolitan villains. If you don’t want McNally to mete out bitter social media justice on you, all you have to do is be nice and gracious to his team. However, for some people, that’s too high a price to pay.
McNally was the driving creative force behind the downtown institution Odeon. You might recall the unmistakable entrance of that restaurant from its appearance on the cover of Bright Lights, Big City. And since then, he’s created some of New York’s most indelible places to sit, eat, and watch. McNally pays close attention to things such as lighting and table spacing — the details of his trade — so that his customers can connect with one another. People don’t come to McNally’s restaurants to snap pictures of the food, although the food at his establishments is uniformly excellent. People come to lean in close and get something done.
I’ve been a happy customer of his restaurants for decades, and I’ve seen nearly everything take place there: marriages, divorces, seductions, deals, betrayals, the good news and bad news tides that make life interesting (and heartbreaking). Everything except, of course, anyone smoking a cigar. There’s a limit, apparently, to McNally’s legendary hospitality.
His book hopscotches a bit through his fascinating timeline, but the spine of the story is formed by his experience a few years ago, when he suffered a massive and debilitating stroke. His recovery (which remains incomplete) and his subsequent struggles with speech, movement, and even cognition are meticulously and brutally recorded, and the result is a darkly funny and often dishy walk through a man’s life and career that is both a celebration and a dirge. McNally might regret almost everything, but he also treasures almost everything. If you’re looking for a working philosophy of life, McNally seems to have hit on one of the best: I Regret Almost Everything is the honest, funny, and riveting story of a man who pays attention to the details, even the ones that are painful or shaming or mortifying to recall.
As I puffed away on my cigar and finished McNally’s terrific book, I looked up to discover that an Asian female tourist had been secretly taking a video of me on her phone. I’m not sure why, exactly — my guess is that with the cigar and a swirl of Armagnac in my glass, I looked like her ideal Parisian cafe customer — but I scowled at her (which probably made it a better video) and she scurried off. So there’s probably an Instagram or TikTok of me floating around somewhere delivering a very false impression of a guy in a Parisian cafe. And that’s how many people prefer social media and life itself: as a series of fake, carefully assembled images that reinforce their preconceived ideas. There are others, of course, such as Keith McNally, who prefer things sharper and rougher and more truthful, both on social media and between the covers of a book. And I’ll always be grateful for them.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer, including as a screenwriter and executive producer on Cheers, and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.