[Mcnally's] memoir...will outlast a single evening out. A perfectly orchestrated meal creates the illusion of effortlessness; McNally’s book serves as an enduring reminder of the work and talent that go into creating such memories, and of the artists whose vision sets the scene.
Wry, insightful and vulnerable, a courageous book alive with mordant humor and British irony ... [Displays] appealing honesty ... Mr. McNally writes candidly about his flaws ... In the aftermath of his terrible stroke, he has established himself as a remarkable writer.
Keith McNally’s memoir, I Regret Almost Everything, is driven by his dislikes, as so many good books are ... His book lives up to this credo, in a manner that gives it more soulfulness and more bottom, as the Brits like to call gravitas, than (let’s say) Graydon Carter’s recent memoir.
Reading the memoir is a bit like scrolling through his feed: he’s not really a raconteur, but he’s an energetic collector of rants, vignettes, and curiosities. This isn’t necessarily a strike against the book. If anything, he’s found a new way to give the crowd what it wants.
Compulsively readable, these anecdotes deliver the atmosphere that diners have come to expect of McNally’s hospitality: decadence and glamour made accessible through a light touch and a louche, punchy style ... What’s most surprising and revealing about the book is its earnest attempt to account for all that McNally has lost ... McNally recounts his early life in remarkable detail ... McNally can tend to draw the women in his life in one dimension ... McNally’s failures to make meaningful links between past and present, emotion and action, action and consequence, reveal a tendency to evacuate rather than metabolize his experiences. This can make for good entertainment, but not great art.
Rueful, self-aware, chatty, entertaining, dazzling, and harrowing: a book that contains multitudes ... McNally is a charming and honest raconteur who’s lived an impossibly broad-ranging life.
McNally writes vividly of his formative years ... 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.
