“In early August 2018, I tried to commit suicide.”

IN a pompous review the Guardian suggested this memoir would have benefited from a bit of editing. That would have been a mistake. The beauty here is the raw courage to tell things as they are. One man’s story. Unedited. Unexpurgated. To the point. There is no reason to let anyone else get involved.

Keith McNally has had a pretty interesting life. He left school in Bethnal Green, east London, at 16. He trod the boards, found his way to New York and opened a series of well known French inspired restaurants which at their height were making $80million a year. But that is only one part of the story; this is as much about mortality as it is about fame.

His friends and acquaintances – Arnold Bennet, Jonathan Miller, Anna Wintour, Chrstopher Hitchens et al are as well-known as the A listers who filled his venues at Balthazar and Prada etc each night. He was said by the New York Times, to have invented downtown. You could also say he showed America what French food was.  And then overnight, he has a stroke. It leaves him almost unable to move or speak. And he struggles with aphasia – which makes spelling difficult – and he also confesses, amazingly for someone who has raised so much money, that balance sheets still mystify him. What McNally does know though is people. And that sense of being engaged ripples through the narrative.

Of Arnold Bennet – who befriended him when he was a teenager in London, he notes, the books would endure, while the stage constructions of Jonathan Miller, another friend who happened to live opposite, would be taken down and destroyed at the end of a run. And it was those Miller stage sets that inspired him to build restaurants in abandoned Manhattan warehouses.

In New York he got his first job as an oyster shucker at One Fifth, was promoted to waiter and then general manager in a few months and then went on to open his first restaurant Odeon – “cobbled together by three amateurs with little money”. It is still there.

Oddly for such a successful restaurateur, the food gets scant mention – one hamburger, a few steak frites. This is not his realm. If you want salmon tartar, you go to the Odeon.

His chefs persuaded him to agree to publish a book of recipes. But he insisted the book needed someone particular to write an introduction. He offered the radical art critic Robert Hughes $40,000. Hughes turned him down. He had better things to write about. So McNally offered him to eat free at Balthazar for the rest of his life. Hughes accepted. And he did.

McNally’s enthusiasms are elsewhere – between services he was an avid theatre and film buff, on his travels he read more than most, probably some of the Bennet and Miller influence rubbing off, and two ex wives and five children.

He harboured an ambition to write. In fact he did write a couple of screenplays and a stage play before this. The struggle to write is one part of the story.

He takes his revenge on restaurant critics by turning his own critical gaze away from hospitality to the kind of expensive higher echelons of American health care, he now needed.

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