I regret almost everything A memoir

Restaurateur McNally (The Balzthazar Cookbook) holds little back in this intense autobiography. He opens with his 2018 suicide attempt after suffering a debilitating stroke, then flashes back to his 1950s childhood in London's East End, a time and place "permeated" by the aftershocks of WWII. McNally writes vividly of his formative years, which saw him leave school at 16 to pursue an acting career. From there, his life took several unexpected turns: McNally moved to Manhattan and was promoted from oyster shucker to maître d' at a trattoria in Greenwich Village because of his English accent, pursued romantic relationships with men and women, and directed two films, one of which he now disowns ("I'd rather be waterboarded than watch it again"). He went on to open several major New York restaurants in the 1980s and '90s, including Balthazar and the Odeon, and paints this ongoing phase of his career as a picaresque punctuated by Mafia shakedowns and battles with food critics. Throughout, McNally makes good on his reputation for unvarnished, sometimes-controversial commentary--at one point, he comes to Woody Allen's defense--but the intimacy this approach generates makes it more of a feature than a bug. It adds up to an intriguing portrait of a complex personality. Agent: Jennifer Joel, CAA. (May)

Memoir by the famed restaurateur of a life expansively lived. McNally opens on a distinctly dour note, with a suicide attempt that didn't take. "There was a time where everything worked," he writes. He'd been happily married, owned eight restaurants in Manhattan and had more in the works, and had bags full of money. Then he had a devastating stroke, "confined to a wheelchair and deprived of language." Robbed of the use of his right hand, he would learn to become a southpaw, as he puts it, and "there's something ruggedly appealing about the word 'southpaw.'" There's much here about the physiology and psychology of strokes and about the involving world of restaurants and the, pardon, dish surrounding them; it was McNally who outed TV celebrity James Corden for an episode of ill manners, for instance, which he now regrets: "For someone who's hyperconscious of humiliation since suffering a stroke, it now seems monstrous that I didn't consider the humiliation I was subjecting Corden to." McNally also writes of the ins and outs of the restaurant business as business, leveraging huge numbers of dollars at Vegas odds with the possibility of losing everything while working with people you might not want to; as he writes of one such person, "You can't form a partnership with a pit bull and then be shocked when he bites you." But more than all that, McNally is a charming and honest raconteur who's lived an impossibly broad-ranging life, acting, directing, traveling the world, spending time with some of the greats in the film and theatrical business (even if, as he writes in anguish, he once failed to seat Ingrid Bergman because he didn't recognize her). On top of everything else, McNally celebrates New York City, where he once was a king but now is quite content simply to call it home. Rueful, self-aware, chatty, entertaining, dazzling, and harrowing: a book that contains multitudes. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.